Male or female? A new Hebrew tool allows you to finally choose online

The Ivrita plugin places a small tab on a website that allows the user to choose to view as a male or female, or remain non-defined.

By ZEV STUB
Ivrita plugin. (photo credit: Courtesy)
Ivrita plugin.
(photo credit: Courtesy)
The Internet already knows everything about you, so why don't Hebrew websites address you by your gender?
That's the question Reuven Karasik and Avraham Cornfeld set out to address when they created their Ivrita plugin for WordPress. The extension gives Hebrew-site webmasters a set of tools that allows users to choose whether they want to be addressed as male or female.
Unlike with English, the grammar of the Hebrew language has gender differences built into almost every sentence. Pronouns like "you," "they" and "we" change if they are referring to male or female, and so do the verbs that follow them. In fact, virtually all nouns in the Hebrew language, from "table" to "city" to "love" conjugate as either male of female. That means that even a simple sentence like "You are going to the store" is significantly different if a man or woman is addressed in the sentence.
"My partner and I write a lot of text online in Hebrew, and it is frustrating to constantly have to write words with slashes to account for both genders," Karasik said. (An English equivalent is the common s/he.) "We tried developing a PHP script, but it didn't work right, so we decided to do this as an open-source community project."
The Ivrita plugin places a small tab on a website that allows the user to choose to view as a male or female, or remain non-defined. Once chosen, text that has been written with slashes, in the format defined by the plugin, will appear in the correct format.  
"Some types of websites are obligated by law to write in both genders, including job listing sites," Karasik said. "This can make those easier to read."
The plugin was launched on the WordPress extensions directory two weeks ago, Karasik said. While he didn't know how many times it had been downloaded, he noted that some large Israeli sites are already using it.
Karasik, who is just 21 and is currently serving in the IDF, says his partner Cornfeld came up with the idea. The two run Alef Alef Alef, a leading portal for Hebrew font design in Israel.
The pair made the JavaScript library available on their website, and they plan to continue developing it with plugins for Wix and WebFlow.
"We hope this is part of a larger movement toward gender quality, and encourage other similar projects in the future," Karasik said.


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Hebrew
Gender
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