Inclusive Chromium code

Why this is important

Our Code of Conduct under "Be respectful and constructive" says:

Each of us has the right to enjoy our experience and participate without fear of harassment, discrimination, or condescension, whether blatant or subtle.

Emphasis is added: unnecessarily exclusive code is discriminatory and condescending, and reading biased code isn't enjoyable.

Gender-Neutral

Some points in our code, documentation and comments contain needless assumptions about the gender of a future reader, user, etc. Example: "When the user logs into his profile."

Suggestions on how to keep code gender-neutral

These are only suggestions. You make the call.

Things to avoid:

Gendered pronouns: he / she / him / her / his / hers, etc.
Instances of the phrases "he or she", "his/hers", "(s)he", etc. All of these still exclude those who don't identify with either gender, and implicitly (slightly) favor one gender via listing it first.
"Guys" as a gender-neutral term, which has male associations. Usually in comments it implies anthropomorphism of inanimate objects and should be replaced with a more precise technical term. If it does refer to people, consider using "everyone", "folks", "people", "peeps", "y'all", etc.
Other gendered words: "brother", "mother", "man", etc.

Cases that are likely fine to leave alone include:

References to a specific person ("Rachel is on leave; update this when she is back.").
A name ("Guy" and "He" are both valid names).
A language code ("he" is the ISO 639-1 language code for Hebrew).
He as an abbreviation for "helium".
The Spanish word "he".
References to a specific fictional person (Alice, Bob, ...).
- For new code/comments, consider using just 'A', 'B' as names.
Quotations and content of things like public-domain books.
Partner agreements and legal documents we can no longer edit.
Occurrences in randomly generated strings or base-64 encodings.
Content in a language other than English unless you are fluent in that language.

How to change the remaining awkward intrusions of gender:

Try rewording things to not involve a pronoun at all. In many cases this makes the documentation clearer. Example: "I tell him when I am all done." → "I tell the owner when I am all done." This saves the reader a tiny bit of mental pointer-dereferencing.
Try using singular they.
Try making hypothetical people plural. "When the user is done he'll probably..." → "When users complete this step, they probably...".
When referring to a non-person, "it" or "one" may be good alternatives (wikipedia link).

Example changelists

For a long list of changes, see this bug. Some examples:

Tools

Here is a code search link prepopulated with a search that finds a lot of gendered terms.
To search for files containing gendered terms, use this command (or a variant of it):

git grep -wiEIl \ '(he)|(she)|(his)|(hers)|(him)|(her)|(guy)|(guys)'

To search in a file open in vim for gendered terms, use this command:

/\<he\>\|\<she\>\|\<his\>\|\<hers\>\|\<him\>\|\<her\>\|\<guy\>\|\<guys\>|\<man\>\c

There are presubmit checks available for this that are run for the infra and v8 repos. They are not run for other repos as there are too many false positives.

Racially neutral

Terms such as "blacklist" and "whitelist" reinforce the notion that black==bad and white==good. That Word Black, by Langston Hughes illustrates this problem in a lighthearted, if somewhat pointed way.

These terms can usually be replaced by "blocklist" and "allowlist" without changing their meanings, but particular instances may need other replacements.

Example changelists

For a long list of changes, see this bug. Some examples:

Thanks

This document is based on an internal Google document by Rachel Grey and others, which can be found here (sorry, Googlers only).