And how come you assume that even if said person indeed has the XX chromosomes (to be nominally classified as a "woman"), that they also self-identify as a woman and prefer the adjective "she" over "he" or some other?
See how far this rabbit hole goes?
It's easy why they assumed the author is male: they don't care who the author is, and didn't read their name on the blog. I read the first 6-7 paragraphs of the post and didn't bother to read the name either. And even if I had, "Sabine" as a name doesn't tell me anything about the gender (not a name we have in my country, nor a very well know one, like Mary or Helen or something that everybody would guess). Heck, there are Spanish men called "Maria".
Had I made a comment I might have used either "they" or assumed it's a man, mostly because statically for things posted at HN, it would be true.
Some fun links:
"Lightning makes new isotopes" http://www.nature.com/news/lightning-makes-new-isotopes-1.23...
"P-values--abused but not abandoned" (includes some nice background on p-values for those of us for whom the concept is a little fuzzy) http://sciencenordic.com/p-values-abused-not-abandoned
A cute video of Feynman answering the question of whether you're seeing an object, or only the light from an object, when looking at it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo
A single-molecule magnet: https://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10.1103/PhysRevLett.119...
...and all that's just in the last 24 hours. She's got a fantastic Twitter feed for the science-interested.
It is not about it being "100% woman" but about "male" being the default. I think it is telling that the assumption seems to be physics -> male. If this would have been about social issues or fashion, maybe the people would have checked before assuming male gender?
I don't say it does not happen to me too, but if it happens, I think it is good to raise awareness.
Hmm, I managed to miss the picture too!
>It is not about it being "100% woman" but about "male" being the default
Is it the default because of bias though, or just because it's just more common -- and people tend to assume based on frequency?
As humans, are we so ignorant to think that we are the apex of intelligence? That we could never be like the house, ignorant of how insignificant we are?
Or is it /s to the point that I perhaps failed to explicitly explain the relevance of my comment to the parent comment? If so, I apologize. The parent comment said "The mechanics of an omnipotent being are infinitely more complex than evolution" and the point of the house analogy was to argue that it's based on viewpoint. The house may think that the mechanics of the human are infinitely more complex (i.e. the wiring of the house barely compares to a handful of neurons from the human), but from the perspective of the human there is nothing complex about the interaction. For the house to be self-bootstrapping from just soup would be curious and highly unlikely from their POV.
As a human our reasoning ability is influenced by our viewpoint (and that's not to say any one viewpoint is right or wrong), so we should always play devils advocate with the razor.