Sometimes I dream about how much further along we'd be in discussions about big tech and algorithmic bias if we doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc... the amount of good faith in the "discussions".
Which is another of way of saying,... I'm just now reading up on the "Google Translate translates these Finnish gender-neutral sentences into gendered sentences in English" kerfuffle.
And there is a really good discussion to have about this. Clearly it's something where almost everyone wants to do better. And doing better will improve the world we all live in. But that great discussion is drowned out by the bad-faith noise about big tech privilege.
Why is the doctor male and the nurse female in the translation of a gender-neutral English phrase into French when we use any of the three biggest companies provided free online translation? We know why, it's really hard to fix, and the tech companies are spending loads on it. 
This paper by Microsoft Research and UCLA is a great start to thinking about the problem. microsoft.com/en-us/research…
ps. "écriture inclusive" is one of the bigger culture wars in France at the moment. Even separate from what "big tech" struggles with, the culture itself is working hard on a very hard problem. la-croix.com/Debats/Faut-in…
You cannot easily remove gender from French, Spanish etc... it would in many ways make things a lot easier, but you can't just do it. At least one European language succeeded in doing it recently*, but in doing so lost a lot of mutual intelligibility with its origin language.
Afrikaans since you're wondering. A fantastic language.
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