> I was very disappointed at this 101 mistake, and sadly opened an issue referencing the question. The body of my issue read:
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.
Sure, we just have to reword it - something like this may be less confrontational:
> "Hi! I have a suggestion on question #14. I think we can improve this to be more inclusive by replacing the options w ith "male", "female", "gender queer" "non-binary", (...) Since transgender people may or may not associate with a gender, we have be a little careful when asking for a gender. Hope this helps!"
When I write emails, I always pretend to "YELL" the email in the most dramatic way possible. If it sounds potentially confrontational yelling what I am saying, it could be intimidating for some people.
By defusing the way you talk to others, you make them feel more comfortable around you. The more comfortable people feel around you, the more they trust you and listen to what you say. It's a win-win :)
As someone who has a naturally terse communication style and who does not react emotionally to people who send emails like e.g. "Send it" instead of "Send it to me, thanks.", I have had to train myself to realise that any form of text communication conveys tone with huge imprecision. If you didn't see someone smiling at you in the corridor and then you send an email to them saying "Yep" the entire tone of the email changes vs. if you saw the person, grinned, said hi and then sent the exact same email.
It's not fair, and bright people very often feel like morons adding exclamation points and smiley faces made out of punctuation to their written comms. but trust me when I say that it can TOTALLY obviate a whole bunch of grief and is, I think, incumbent on you the communicator to improve just as much as it's incumbent on the recipient to not react emotionally.
Some data scientist made a small survey faux pas, and now they're being called out in a lengthy blogpost about how bad and un-inclusive the company was to work for.
How can anyone work with this person without feeling like they're standing on eggshells? How must the woman who wrote the survey who was just doing her job feel today if she reads this?
The post would never have been written if the author of the question hadn't immediately escalated by complaining to her manager. The data scientist was not walking on eggshells- they felt perfectly justified in escalating the situation. Even the manager didn't have a problem with how she'd handled it!
I read it as an indictment of the company and its procedures. The data scientist was not even named. The bulk of the post is indicting management, HR, company culture, and insane bureaucratic nightmares designed to push someone out.
> they felt perfectly justified in escalating the situation
So they should have been, being accused of transphobia is a serious accusation. Anyone accused of anything like transphobia, homophobia, islamaphobia or any other of these discriminations is absolutely right to escalate the matter straight away to their manager or HR.
> The data scientist was not even named
She was gendered, how many data scientists work at GH? How many are female? She was narrowed down enough that she may as well have been named IMHO and transphobic is a serious mark on her character. Especially from someone who has tried to push people off projects before for being transphobic.
If the account is to be believed, she was not accused of transphobia. She was told about a question that was misphrased. Even the author's manager couldn't articulate anything she'd done wrong.
The "transphobia" judgement by the poster comes later in the post, and it is addressed to the question itself, not the author of the question.
Thought I was alone on this. I think she read it poorly, and to call it a 101 mistake that she 'sadly' had to correct seems a bit unfair to the data scientist. But none of that comes across in her comment, which is extremely professional.
> "'Transgender' is not a gender. Transgender people may be male, female, gender queer, non-binary... If you want to know if a survey respondent is transgender, you need to explicitly ask that question."
She was disappointed. She explained her problem with the survey in a non-judgmental way- "This question is based on a false premise, the correct way to ask this question is X". I don't see how she could have handled this particular interaction any better.