Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. I'm a guy so obviously don't have the experience (any) women have but I will say this.

Three things will essentially give away your gender:

1. Your stated gender;

2. Your name (with a high degree of accuracy in most cultures that I'm aware of); and

3. Your photos.

So for (1) to have any impact, (2) and (3) must be hidden. Since all profiles are public, I'm not sure you can hide (2).

Give all that, I'm not sure I understand the rationale for hiding gender but, like I said, I don't have the experience.

That all being said, I really don't see the issue with hiding it.

I strongly encourage people who feel strongly about it to be vocal about it and ask for either the ability to have it not stated or to hide it (like you can with things like the number of "followers" you have).

EDIT: on the accuracy of gender prediction from Facebook profiles:

http://cis.poly.edu/~ross/papers/NameCentric.pdf

I realize this isn't exactly the issue here. Most people concerned with harassment probably aren't worried about computer models that can predict their gender based on their name, information from their profile or their writing style. I imagine harassment is far less systematic than that.

EDIT2: I would contend that a bigger factor in whether someone gets harassed is how they present their profile rather than a single field.

For example, if your profile is public, has pictures of how partying and getting drunk, has many messages about what a party animal you are and/or your dating life, some will see that (rightly or wrongly) as an invitation for attention (good or bad).

I would be very interested to hear from people who have been harassed or bullied online or have been the victims of such crimes in the real world and hear how they use social networks and how they present themselves online. I suspect they tend to keep everything private.

I'd also be interested to hear how important it is that gender is shown on a profile. It's all well and good for us to speculate about this but I really would like to hear from some people with first hand experience.

As has been asserted in fragmented bits all over the place (here and in the original Google+ thread), the problem is that there is an enormous hiatus between personal and social ways of approaching gender.

On an individual scale you can see how personal expressions of sexual and gender identity can vary. [1] On a social scale, however, we deal with gender in a grossly simplified manner (and there are linguistic and historic forces which constrain us into defaulting to this attitude).

Mr Munroe is bringing up some issues (for what is worth, that of female-bullying attitude on the internet should be known to any gardener of virtual communities here on HN). But the whole issue is a much messier Pandora's box.

There are many people of either biological gender [2] who for different personal reasons wish to be more or less defined in terms of their sexual and gender identities, and in ways that a simple "I'm a {he, she, it}" form won't permit.

Imposing a (forcefully public!) choice is stepping on many people's toes, and I'm not quite sure what's the relevance of that. Google is smart. They could be gathering much better user-targeting data if they had implemented gender identity as a text field in the profile. [3] You know more about people (regardless of gender) who would fill that textbox with "dragon" than you can ever know about someone merely because they chose between man, woman, or other.

[1] An elegant if simplified reflection of what I'm talking about is given in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741580

[2] Not to mention the outliers to this binary opposition.

[3] See this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2741536

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ps. — EDITED a couple phrasings.

pps. — Concerning your EDIT #2, I see where you're coming from and I assume no bad faith from you, but please realise that this position you're assuming is very hard to tell apart from the "she was raped because she was dressing slutty" argument which set the internet afire not a couple months ago.

There are more names than you realise that give away little about gender, or are used by people across the gender spectrum. For example, Alex, Sam, Rowan, Raven, and Kim.

And as for photos, it's harder to tell than you think from a static photo, as a lot of gender presentation comes from body language. Speaking of which, photos only give you gender presentation - which can be quite different to someone's self-dentified gender.

Well said. And plenty of people use avatars rather than photos.

I think the main issue is that it's the only field that's required to be public. That makes it seem out-of-place.

You can tell a lot about someone's ancestry from their name as well, but it would be pretty weird if Randall's profile looked like this:

  Name: Randall Munroe
  Ancestry: Scottish[1]

And that was it. Even though it's kind of obvious, it's encouraging people to think about it, and calling attention to any stereotypes people might have about Scottish people. This is probably not so bad for Scots, but there are a number of ethnicities that carry serious social baggage, and they may prefer not to be called to attention.

Of course, I don't need to know Mr. Munroe's ancestry to refer to him using pronouns in most languages. Getting that information from a name is also much less reliable. It's obviously not quite the same. I think it does highlight the issue pretty well, though.

[1] Which I am inferring from his last name; I have no idea about his actual ancestry.

A good way of avoiding this problem is to get rid of pronouns altogether. Case in point (drumroll): Facebook's interface!

You can count on one hand how many times they use pronouns, and those could be actually be removed as well.

In English, yes, but in other languages this isn't always possible.

In romance languages, it doesn't even necessarily require pronouns. The English sentence "Sam is tall." cannot be translated into Spanish without knowing whether Sam is male or female.

Interestingly, Google Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is male, while Microsoft Translate assumes (in this case) that Sam is female.

Facebook abuses "their".

They do! In fact, their stream stories used to allow <fb:pronoun /> tags so that when an app published something, you didn't need to refer to him/her as "them". But that changed about a year ago, so now facebook is a major paragon in familiarizing folks with the word "their" being singular.

Giving away my gender is much less of a concern for me than the presentation characteristics of the profile. My gender is "noise" on my profile. I'd be better served by whitespace instead of displaying my gender. It makes Google+ profile feel at worst like a dating site and at best a random collection of facts.

+1. I mean, would you expect gender to be a big deal on, say, linkedin?

Sometimes, the way in which you form paragraphs and sentences can give away an individuals gender identity. Check this out, and the accompanying paper.

Female Score: 8

Male Score: 14

The Gender Genie thinks the author of this passage is: male!

http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.php

http://www.cs.biu.ac.il/~koppel/papers/male-female-text-fina...

50% of the time, it's going to be right by simply choosing a random number.

The problem with this is that it reflects the issues with our society more than people's genders. Having a reasonable education and writing about STEM* tends to make anyone male, according to that.

* Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths

I have been coded female, male, and androgynous depending on the writing sample. Oh HN, I would be coded as a man. In my fiction writing, I would be coded as a woman. In academic writing, I am coded as a man. In other non-fiction, I might be coded as a woman.

I am just saying that this is unreliable. Further, writing styles are a function of social construction, which break down in situations where this is a sensitive subject.

I went to my university's electronic PhD thesis repository, and went down the list, starting with the most recently published, skipping people of the same gender to the last selected thesis or whose gender was not obvious from the name, until I had 10 PhD theses, 5 male, 5 female. I put the abstracts from each thesis into the 'gender genie', and these are the results:

Author male, predicted as male: 4 Author female, predicted as male: 4 Author male, predicted as female: 1 Author female, predicted as female: 1

Obviously, a larger sample is needed, but those results make it look very unreliable - especially compared to an outright statement of gender.

While I think privacy and gender issues are incredibly important symptoms, there's a deeper debate being had here:

Will the internet of the future be a place where your persona can generally be isolated from your person? Historically, online spaces were a haven for that type of anonymity.

The trend is firmly in the opposite direction; with good and bad consequences.

IRC and anonymous or pseudonimous fora are still out there, and there is no trend in forcing gender choice in them.

Those of us who have been here for long enough to play with online personas and to enjoy intelligent use of anonymity are bound to feel nostalgic, but I honestly don't see a trend so much as I see the real world's biases finally catching up with the internet, where's the space for everyone and then some.

Of course -- however, the default used to be "On the internet, nobody know's you're a dog." There were very few sites, especially online communities, that would require your real name; of those that did, very few of them would require its disclosure to, say, search engine crawlers.

That's becoming the exception.

(edit: minor grammar fix.)

2 is easy to work around- many women use generically male nicknames (such as Sam for Samantha) or have names that could be either gender. Photos can be kept private.

(2) is simple to hide...I have a ton of friends in Facebook who have never entered their full name into their profile, only initials. i.e. 'MS Jones' or 'G Johnston'

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