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.

To me you're all arguing about the wrong issue.

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?

Agreed. That was an entirely reasonable and professional comment. It briefly states the problem, demonstrates it, and offers a solution.

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.

EDIT: Just saw your comment below (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14704575). Makes perfect sense, and I see her point now.