Inclusive language use

Question

My question concerns this edit to an answer I wrote, but it's actually a more general question.

In the answer, I wrote about "dads" owning or having access to computers in the 1990s. Someone "corrected" it to "parents" with the comment "corrected to inclusive language". Personally, I'd like to change it back, but I'd also like some feedback what you think, because my world view and experience in the 1990s was severely limited. Basically limited to everything one could reach on a bike and be back before family dinner. Maybe it was different outside that range and I would like my answer there to be a general answer that captures at least "the West" in the 90s, not just my little bubble of it.

I agree that today it would be absolutely appropriate to talk about "parents" of all sorts.

However, my text is about "back then". And in my experience it wasn't "a parent's [computer]", but exclusively "dad's". I don't know a single "mom" being anywhere near computers or having access to computers at work. The girls sure had computers or access the same as the boys, but for the parent's generation, it was all males where I grew up.

So my two questions:

1. Was that your experience as well? Because the whole point is kinda moot if enough of the other people here experienced computer access to be evenly distributed across genders. Maybe my experience was an outlier in that regard?
2. Assuming it actually wasn't evenly distributed (and I obviously stereotype quite a lot in that post anyway) back then, is it okay to remove the "inclusivity" when in fact it wasn't that inclusive in reality?

Answer 1

To me, those changes are fine both personally and stylistically

• Personally: Nominally, my suburban south LA County, CA, family got an Apple IIe shortly after its release in '83 when I was in middle school, but it was Mom who played Zork and other Infocom games on it and, when necessary, did troubleshooting. Further, my parents owned and operated a small but successful enough real estate appraisal business from the late '60s until the early '00s. There, they clung to typewriters for as long as they could but switched to PCs in the early 90s. Both parents were competent PC users, but they were both incompetent PC troubleshooters. (By then, though, I was an adequate troubleshooter from running a BBS, so I'd do it if a technician were unavailable.)

  In other words, while you didn't "know a single [i.e. lone] 'mom' being anywhere near computers or having access to computers at work," the 90s saw both my mom and dad working on computers.

• Stylistically: I thought the answer was a blast to read before the edits. I'd upvoted it before I was halfway through. I do think the edits remove some of the causal intimacy of the original, but I also think that's a small price to pay to increase the answer's inclusiveness. Were this answer's audience narrower—were it being adapted to a college application, for example, or being considered for inclusion in a book of your best answers on RPG SE—, I'd recommend changing it back because the original's voice is more strongly you, but as a widely viewed standalone answer answer on RPG SE, the changes make sense.

Answer 2

Most of the answer uses the words "you" and "your" to describe the experience. The target audience for this answer is the general RPG.SE userbase, rather than just yourself.

Maybe your personal experience was limited to dads as the primary computer user, but that doesn't necessarily represent the entire Western world during that period. There were certainly moms who used computers in the 1990s. Also, some people didn't have dads around.

If you're trying to address a larger audience, then it makes logical sense to use the more inclusive language.

A dad is a type of parent, so the edit doesn't harm the answer or change its meaning. There is no need for a rollback.

Answer 3

From a world view standpoint, I'd like to suggest that yes, yours was a little provincial.

I was an adult in the 1990s (born in 1959). I got my first home computer in 1986, first DOS machine in 1987, installed Windows 3 (on that same machine) in 1990. I was a member of a computer users' group (think "Meetup") starting in 1986 as well. More than a third of the users' group members were women -- including two deaf members, one of them with a bone disorder that confined her to a power wheelchair.

That to say, home computers (at least in the Seattle area) were far from a "Dad's" machine, even before 1990 -- but they were expensive enough that someone had to have a strong interest to spend the money (I paid $1000 for my first DOS machine, with 512k RAM, dual 360k floppy drives, CGA -- 16 colors, 4 at a time, and low res -- and no hard disk or built-in modem, in 1987, when the same money would buy a good used motorcycle or a reliable, if ugly used car).

What you describe, the computers being "Dad's" machines, was a cultural bias (not your bias, but your culture's). Women who hadn't been raised to believe they could or should have technical interests followed the lifestyle they were raised into (mostly), and men, raised to believe machines were their domain, developed the interest and technical knowledge to buy, set up, and operate a home computer in the days when "Plug n' Play" was the new thing that really didn't work most of the time.

In a less rural setting, you might well have seen a different situation, with women owning and operating computers, not necessarily because the women were more technically oriented, but because they had a better concept of what the computer could do for them. The users' group I mentioned was one founded around the social interactions of modem use -- bulletin board systems and such (before broad Internet access), which was more attractive to the women of the '80s and '90s culture than the technical aspects (in most cases). That is to say, those women, at that time, weren't mainly programmers or hardware hackers; they were social users.