WIT and Language

I’ve been thinking about this post for a while, but it took me some time to write it because this is not the kind of thing I usually write about.
I really support WIT. During my years in tech I’ve worked with many men and women, and I can’t say that one gender is “better” than the other. I really don’t see a reason for the bias and discrimination in the tech field (or any field for that matter)
Before I start I just want to add a disclaimer. I have no formal education in this field, and I didn’t do any research on this. This is only my opinion, and if you think differently, I’ll be really happy to hear that.
But what I want to write about today is language terms, and this is not only for tech, but in general. There is a trend lately (or maybe not so lately) to talk about terms that are causing this bias or affecting the gender inequality. One example for that is this video by Mayim Bialik.
So what Mayim says is that we refer to males using a few different words, depending on their age: “boy” for a younger kid, “guy” for a young adult, and “man” for adult. But for females, we use “girl” for young adults as well (and sometimes for not so young). This causes our subconscious to refer to these women as young kids, and this affects our approach towards women.
Another example for this is group phrases like “guys”, or professional occupations like policeman or fireman.
I’ve been fortunate enough to know more than a single language. My mother tongue is Hebrew, which is completely different to English in many many ways. Every time I hear these claims about how language makes a difference I try to think about how to say this stuff in Hebrew.
So in short, all of the examples above are irrelevant. In Israel I guess we have the same bias, same gender inequality and same difficulty for women in tech and other fields. However, in Hebrew we say “policeman” for men and “policewoman” for women, we have an equivalent of “guy” for females and we use it very often (much more than “woman” which is reserved for mainly older women), and we have a group word like “guys” but it’s gender neutral.
I’m sure that Hebrew is not the only language that has that, and I wonder if people think that women get more respect because of that in these countries.
In my (uneducated) opinion, it’s something deeper than that. We can come up with an equivalent word for a “guy” for women, we can use “firefighter” instead of “fireman”, and we can say “hi everyone” instead of “hi guys”. But I believe that this is a pointless effort. Even if this becomes a success, I don’t think it would make a difference.
I don’t know how this evolves, but it seems that even at a young age (when they are really “boys” and “girls”) they decide that “boys are better in math and sports than girls”. And this video shows it (it’s a commercial, but a damn good one about the topic): run like a girl.
I really hope that people will really understand what causes this behavior and will work hard on changing it. I’ll do my best to stop using “Good morning guys” when I start a session in a conference, but more importantly, I’ll stop using the “like a girl” phrases. My daughter should know that she can do whatever she wants and the fact that she is indeed “a girl” should mean completely nothing. I fully support women in all male dominated fields, and I hope you do to.