Hacker News Reader

Comment by roywiggins | Hacker News Reader

to be honest I find it hard to take writing that uses "females" as a synonym for "women" super seriously

Did you just latch onto this without intpreting it in context? The tone he used in that part of the article is derogatory towards the employers of these women, the inference being that these employers don't look past them as being "female" and exploiting this for their purposes.

You know what I can't stand? People broadly dismissing something because of ONE word they don't agree with. Grow up.

I took that reference more to be a slant that men are fairly predictable and companies exploit the sausage fest that is the IT/tech world.

To be honest, I find it hard to take comments that focus on irrelevant points seriously.

(Or that seem to forget that on the web there are non-native English speakers too, and that particular "language crime" can be totally how the words work in their language -- though in this case the original author does have an english name).

Look at the bright side: at least it did not say "Booth bunnies" or "booth babes"

I have actually noticed this becoming more common. “Females” is what you refer to as strictly cis-females, where as women generally means a mix of transgendered and cis-females. So if a man’s dating profile says “females only”, you know what he’s talking about.

like omg that's so ableist!

What if I were a trans-woman and wanted to be called female??

This horrible trans-normative oppression needs to stop!

I am going to go protest at a starbucks.

it is quite ironic, considering the topic of the post

to be honest you are missing the forrest for the tree. start a flamewar somewhere else.

In current culture, especially SV, not all women are female. It is necessary to specify female if one is actually referring to biological sex instead of cultural gender. Some find this an annoying distinction but it is the cultural norm in an increasingly growing number of places.

Yet is still a very small minority, and it appears that you are needlessly seeking out ways to be offended when no offense was meant.

Not sure what in my post indicated that I was offended. The cultural context of the industry might be apparent to you from within that context but not everyone who reads Hacker News lives in that same context. That biological sex and cultural gender are not the same is not something that is held to be true everywhere. Explaining the context we live in is not the same thing as being offended that some either don't understand or dislike that part of our culture. Or to put it another way, don't shoot the messenger.

But the story obviously wasn't referring to biological sex, but rather to the gender presented by the booth-worker. So "female" was also the incorrect term, besides being off-putting.

gender is not a theory.

'identifying' as another gender means wearing a stereotype.

Actually, gender is and was always a theory. Before it was applied to humans in the current sense, it was a grammatic theory. This idea of gender as another name for sex is simply ahistorical - seriously, just go to Google Books and search for "gender" before 1955. It's only about grammar. Then John Money came around and use the word exactly to draw a distinction between biological sex and the cultural/sociological construct.

I do not think that was the intended usage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com