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Comment by CarolineW | Hacker News Reader

I hate to be "that person" ... but what is it in this paper that makes it appropriate to label it "The boy's guide ..."

Answer: nothing. Nothing at all.

Words matter, role-models matter, names matter, and this is just completely tone-deaf in today's world.

Men (and boys) may scoff, but seeing the title is seriously off-putting. Unnecessary, inappropriate, and the problem is that the author probably has no clue.

I've not looked too closely yet, and I will, but it appears accessible, accurate, informative, and useful. It may even prove to be actionable. I just wish the title was different.

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It is a form of dry pedantic humor. In early 20th century USA, there were a lot of instructional books marketed at children with titles like this... "A Boy's Guide to Fishing", and so on.

The author, who wishes finance students to remain focused on the fundamentals rather than getting lost in esoterica, chose a title that harkens back to these plain-spoken primers. I suppose he didn't stop to think that most of his audience wouldn't get the reference.

It's about as un-PC as "The Dangerous Book for Boys", really (which my daughter read without being noticeably triggered).

I understood the reference straight away, but that doesn't reduce how unfortunate it is when one of thousands of other titles could have worked just as well.

Especially since the contents don't continue with the 'boys' theme.

It would have been nice if the author had included Boy Scouts style line illustrations... I'm picturing a scoutmaster in knee socks and a kerchief on one knee in front of an easel with an options payout diagram.

I actually bought a French version of one of these books for one of my daughters, focusing on science. But after reading through it a bit it was clear that girls were just not part of the intended public, so it didn't go under the Christmas tree.

The book was nominally about science, but it had a clear second message that I didn't want my 9 year-old girl to receive, with dad's stamp of approval.

I hear you. One of my friends (female) is a physicist whose career has succeeded in the face of many of her peers telling her - repeatedly, for decades - that women can't be as good as men at hard sciences because their brains are just wired differently at a biological level (a traditional attitude in the field). It's pretty draining.

I just can't get too exercised about "Boy's Guide" level insensitivity. If my daughter wants to go to Wall St., she's gonna need waaayyyy thicker skin than that. The biz attracts assholes and predators; it's not exactly snowflake-friendly.

I mean, at least i-banks are no longer openly allowing charges at whorehouses and strip clubs on company cards, but stuff like this does go on:

https://seagullreference.blogspot.com/2009/12/gross-details-...

that might be true but don't you realize that those titled themselves are offensive? because the books weren't for children equitably but for boys.

To be fair, people on here would lose their shit if it had been called 'The girls's guide to pricing and hedging'. Interestingly it would be largely a different set of people.

Who cares? Stop trying to police everyone else's diction.

"Men (and boys) may scoff" because this kind of criticism is totally irrelevant to the actual ideas being discussed. I know from experience that just about any person (man or woman) who has done a trading job professionally has had to put up with way worse in the time required to learn how to make money.

And in "today's world," a lot of us don't care about the politics of jealous misandry.

> just about any person (man or woman) who has done a trading job professionally has had to put up with way worse in the time required to learn how to make money.

Whether or not this is the case, it shouldn't be, and little things like this title subtly reinforce a culture where it is ok.

Exactly, it's about the impact of thousands of these small comments and insinuations over the years have on a group of persons.

If a woman hears and reads this kind of comments over her life, she will end up believing that Finance is not for women and not even choose it as a profession.

You care enough to comment that someone else shouldn't care enough to comment, hmmmmm.

The title is obviously tongue in cheek and meant to be light hearted. I mean the article's first sentence is "There is an unfortunate strain of pedantry..." And given that in 2019 you can't use the joking title "A boys guide..." to anything anymore, the world has become much more pedantic. Humor will no longer be tolerated if even a single person doesn't think it is funny.

I think it’s just a title in the British style from the 40s where there were lots of books with “for boys” in the title.

It usually implies a gloss over some otherwise serious subject: camping, survival, the universe, etc.

Agreed, and it's disappointing that you're getting downvoted for pointing this out.

It's probably an attempted play on words based on guides for boys, but yes, it's pretty tone deaf for something published anytime in the last 50 years or so.

To be fair, tone is in the ear of the beholder. Not to be disparaging, but I see your comment and the parent comment to be tone-deaf. I think it's just a difference of perspective.

In what sense are those two comments tone deaf?

I agree. The only thing I can say in its defence is that it's from 2003. Not a million years ago but I'd like to think we've moved on a bit in 16 years.

i agree wholeheartedly with you but just to point out it does look like this is from 2003

In 2003, steampunk was really big, and this seems like a throwback to that neo-victorian terminology.

I could understand this excuse if instead of 2003 it was written in 1920.

That said, it only contains the word "boy" once in the entire article, and only in the provocative headline.

I think we can all look past the provocative headline.

It does in fact contain the word "man" though in a (normally) non-gendered idiom.

> rather abbreviated poor man’s guide to the field

edit: just realised that there wasn't a space between "poor" and "man". However, it seems from a quick google search both versions (separate and a single word) are used for this expression.

Is "the boy" a patriarchic stand-in for the word "child", or what? It seems like some kind of in-group slang. Reminds me of the British expression "old boy", meaning "man".

I am so glad several other commenters here have pointed out that boy's guides were fairly common and this is a cute reference to that genre of book. There were girl's guides too. It is not the least bit offensive nor meant to cause offense.

Were the girl's guides about the same things as boy's guides? By cute, you probably meant harmless. You probably didn't mean to say that gender roles are cute. I guess its harmlessness is up for debate. My position on the matter is that there's no place for socially constructed gender roles in this society, and it's not cute.

Girls guides were about the activities most girls were engaged in at the time, cooking, sewing, etc. You never would have seen a "Girls Guide to Shortwave Radio," for example, fifty years ago because practically no women were doing it. I am sure it would have delighted a small handful of girls, but that is not how markets work. You don't print a book if it is not going to sell.

I generally disagree with your position on gender roles, which I think evolve naturally and are not necessarily bad.

We disagree on multiple points, but I appreciate your cool-headed and open approach to conversation.

The first thing I thought of was a callback to those old books targeted at near-adolescent boys e.g. The Boy's Own Guide to Fishing.

Obviously, it comes off as clumsy and inappropriate today or 16 years ago judging by the date on the footer.

Articles with gender in the title tend to get complaints. If it has women, men, boy, girl, male or female in the title, there is almost always a comment complaining to that fact.

I think it would improve the comment environment if HN had a title policy against using gender in it unless the article is clearly focused on it and has something new to contribute on the topic of gender. A lot of article titles would benefit by simply removing it.

If you can't get over a word being used in the title then how can you be expected to grasp the content? Child-proofing the internet is absurd

Or, ya' know, you just move past it like a normal person and comment on the actual content.

> I think it would improve the comment environment if HN had a title policy against using gender in it

Then dang and co will end up writing articles like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19971454

Ignoring gender and gender dynamics on social media will not solve the issue in real life, it will just further the perception that social media is disconnected from reality. In my opinion, it would do more harm than good.

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