On Wednesday, 23 March 2016 at 08:37:01 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 3/23/2016 1:27 AM, Ola Fosheim Grøstad wrote:
I never trust people who claim that they never discriminate,
because I have yet
to meet a person that doesn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you%27re_a_dog
If you hide your gender you can, but I vastly prefer people who
present their real name. I rate people more favourably if they go
by their real handle, even if I strongly disagree with them,
honesty is a very important quality. So I don't think
discrimination can be avoided (in the broad sense), without going
into hardcore deception (and that can be damaging). There is this
famous essay of a MUD community that mourned over the death of a
core community member, but it turned out the person just
committed virtual suicide, not a physical death...
I've been playing several personas that were female presenting in
settings where it was socially acceptable, but male acting,
before this became a topic (mid 90s) and there certainly was bias
in the interaction that ensued from time to time. It is also very
educational to put yourself emotionally into identity and
cultural expectations related to the opposite gender.
Anyway, there are positive qualities to both the more cooperative
female side (information sharing) and the more competitive male
side (debating) of interaction within a group. We all have both
aspects, of course, and for progress we need a mix.
But gender affects how some people learn too. Male students may
not want to admit to others that they don't know the topic and
study the manuals instead of asking questions. Female students
appears to have less resistance to asking questions. This is good
if you want to be productive, but by studying the manuals you
also learn a lot of stuff that you don't need at the time, but
might need later. Some women also do this, of course, but I think
there might be many very real gendered reasons for why more men
are technical geeks than women.
Generally, it seems like it is more common for female engineers
seems to be motivated by solving real problems rather than having
the technology being the goal. I think male geeks often are the
ones that picked their toys into pieces to figure out how they
worked. Some girls do that too, just not as common.
