I received an email to my work account today that started with “Dear Sirs…”. The email was sent, presumably, to a large number of customers at once about a networking issue by a UK hosting company.
I am female and at the time the salutation bugged me. In normal society one doesn’t generally greet a member of one gender with the salutations of the other. When I received the email my brain put together discussions from LinuxChix mail lists and other recent discussions on women in IT.
I took offence at the salutation “Sirs” because it implies that there are no women working in IT which is clearly not the case.
Anyways, I sent an email in reply to the email (which went to a support@ email) saying that I didn’t appreciate being addressed as a “Sir”. Less than 25 minutes later I received an email from the managing director of saying he wrote the message and thought the salutation “Sirs” was …was an acceptable greeting if the gender of the other party is unknown. I’m not sure I agree but I appreciated the feedback anyways and replied to him thanking him for taking the time to reply. Hopefully he will do as his email says and take my feedback on board and change the way his company addresses emails to women.
My good deed for the day is done.
