O’Reilly Books is known for a variety of technical publications on computer administration,  computer programming and other technical topics. In the community, they are affectionately known as “animal books” since many of their texts feature an animal on the cover:

Unfortunately, for the keepers of tradition, O’Reilly has a policy of socially engineering their readership. In one publication on agile methods, the engineering was so blatant and overbearing that I stopped reading the book  altogether, as it kept breaking the required concentration. I followed up by rating the book as poorly as their feedback scale would allow.

I was recently treated to another case of this irksome policy, albeit small. Here is an example from their “Embedded Linux” publication.

Despite a growth in both the availability of Linux distributions targeted at embedded use, and their use in embedded Linux devices, your friend’s development team may well have custom built their own system from scratch (for reasons explained later in this book). Conversely, when an end user says she runs Linux on the desktop, she most likely means that she installed one of the various  distributions, such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), SuSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES), Ubuntu Linux, or Debian GNU/Linux.

The traditions of good scholarship require that the neutral pronoun form be the masculine, in this case “he”, not “she”. O’Reilly’s use of the feminine pronoun can only serve a few purposes outside of annoying its male dominated consumer base. One purpose might be the fashionable promotion of the stereotype in our heretical society that men, particularly husbands and fathers, are irrelevant at best and buffoons at any rate. Already the portrayal of these roles is common in the entertainment industry along with deliberate single motherhood and loss of patronymic traditions. Why not in the fabric of our language as well?

This use of the feminine pronoun in a field highly populated by male nerds makes the attempt at social engineering extremely cartoonish.  I am not the only one that thinks so. The following link on O’Reilly’s website outlines the issue extant for ten years: Ask Tim.  Although I like the publications in general, I can  no longer purchase them simply based on this policy. Fortunately, there are cheaper and less intrusive ways of getting spun up on a technical topic.