Poll: Male or female or other
2 years since last poll. Lets see where we are at now? Previous polls:
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22Poll%3A+Male%22
EDIT: Added a 3rd new option "Other" on public demand.
https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22Poll%3A+Male%22
EDIT: Added a 3rd new option "Other" on public demand.
Or perhaps they're comments that the writer believes are gender-neutral, so the gender of the reader isn't an issue? This is obviously not always true, but it might be in some cases that are misread as being male comments directed toward other men.
> Some amount of introspection on how to be welcoming to everyone is good, but the constant drumbeat of articles on the "woman question" definitely increases my feelings of "otherness".
The "woman question" wording isn't really the most common phrasing, and it certainly sounds exclusionary.
In all such exchanges, there are some encouraging facts:
1. Mathematics doesn't care about your gender.
2. Code doesn't care about your gender.
3. A properly run code project doesn't care about your gender, only whether you can code.
Expressed another way, the basics of code development are gender-neutral, and where people are involved, a certain amount of direct experience will persuade most people that your results are worth supporting.
As to being excluded in a more social sense, the best way to defeat that is not to care about it. It's basic human psychology that not caring about acceptance will make the other group members wonder why you don't care, which naturally enough and quickly makes you an insider.
If you had done that, I wouldn't have replied. "Mansplained" explains nothing, it only argues for a nonexistent distinction between men and women, like the oppressive idea that women think about the world differently, process reality differently, do math and science differently, than men do.
There has never been a more pointlessly divisive idea among the feminist ranks than the idea that there is a uniquely female way to think about the world. It's false and it undermines women -- it encourages sympathy for an idea that oppresses women.
"Mansplained" is just a code word for "ignore him -- he's a man, i.e. the enemy."
> ... instead of declaring what will and won't lead to our isolation?
At present, in a country where women's rights are guaranteed by law, what isolates women more than anything else are those women who dismiss arguments as being either male or female. Truth has no gender.
You can't seriously believe this. This same argument is made in gaming about issues people have with how women are treated and depicted within that industry: "If you don't bring it up and act like it's a problem, people won't think it's a problem and therefore it won't happen." It's a total crock, not "basic human psychology".
Hateful people don't care that they're the minority; they'll type in all-caps, call you a crybaby, show up with their guns out for all to see, call you sheeple and claim their truth is the real truth regardless of their numbers.
> You can't seriously believe this.
Yes, it's true, and it's the most basic kind of psychology. One doesn't need to spend much time as an adult before seeing scores of examples.
> This same argument is made in gaming about issues people have with how women are treated and depicted within that industry: "If you don't bring it up and act like it's a problem, people won't think it's a problem and therefore it won't happen."
You just changed the subject, and it's not remotely the "same argument". I'm talking about perceptions of exclusivity and being or not being an insider on purely psychological grounds. You're talking about proactive behavior toward women.
> Hateful people don't care that they're the minority; they'll type in all-caps, call you a crybaby, show up with their guns out for all to see, call you sheeple and claim their truth is the real truth regardless of their numbers.
Faced with that, you have three choices -- the first two are ignore them or have them arrested. If what they do isn't an arrestable offense, if it's "free speech", then ignore them. If you cannot ignore them and can't arrest them, then we have a case of PyCon syndrome -- an impasse in which everyone gets hurt and no one benefits.
The third choice should be obvious -- for those women who can't stand the behavior of men, they should start their own tech companies -- an occupation for which women are fully qualified -- and turn the tables on the overgrown adolescents. There is venture capital ready to support women's companies, there is plenty of political support, and there are plenty of talented women. Let men collide with a glass ceiling for a change.
But you know what? The day when women could blame men for their professional and economic problems has passed. It's unseemly, out of date and it contradicts everyday reality.
You must also gloss over all of the threads relating to women-only events and women-centric ventures wherein the comments boil down to "Why do women need this? How is actively excluding themselves going to help us as a whole?" and "Great, now they'll feel like even specialer snowflakes." When Github announced that they were doing on-site talks by women for women, the comments broke out in fears that men were not allowed to show up and how bothersome this "trend" was and how disappointed they would be in Github for allowing such.
And your point that the exclusion is purely psychological is unfortunate. I was oblivious to gender issues until I started experiencing them for myself. The outright discrimination was degrading and unexpected and if I hadn't started building websites because of the love of the craft and that I started doing so in a community dominated by women, I probably would have reconsidered my life's path right then and there.
Lastly, while I understand you mean well by your other comments (re: men and women really being no different), I don't think a man can speak on behalf of any female-identifying persons' "everyday reality."
Enjoy.
It's not a question of not seeing it, it's a question of dwelling on it, allowing it to degrade one's effectiveness. You need to realize that men face the same kinds of erosive, degrading comments from their peers, but they (at least successful men) process them differently -- they ignore all but the constructive suggestions. And so do successful women.
More constructively: your advice is not really actionable if your premise is that one must have the same emotions as you and think the way you do. And people can't just rewire their brains because a man on the Internet says their problems are all in their head.
I sometimes wonder why people are so desperate to craft a position that the other person has never taken. Want to constructively discuss issues? Limit yourself to thing the other person has actually said.
My statement is that men have chosen a more effective way to deal with erosive influences, and it's a behavior that women can and should adopt -- not by imitating men, but by adopting a more effective approach to negative influences. There's no gender dimension to it.
If I had said that gerbils have a more effective adaptation, would you have the right to ask, "So you want everyone to become a gerbil?"
> And people can't just rewire their brains because a man on the Internet says their problems are all in their head.
You need to stop inventing imaginary positions for other people. I never said or implied what you claim. My remarks address, not the original influences, but constructive ways to deal with them.
> In other words, "have you tried being a man?"
Have you tried being a person?
Have a great night :)
Yes, so it's a good thing I never said any such thing, anywhere, ever. It's not in your head, it's real -- so start your own company and exclude the overgrown adolescents. But you need to stop blaming men -- there's no point and it makes you look childish.
At a certain age, usually early teens, everything is the fault of one's parents. Isn't it nice that we all outgrow that phase, move on to the kind of personal accountability that validates other people's trust in us?
The way to address this is to call people out on their sexist bullshit and force them to own it, not to ignore it and thereby grant tacit approval.
Correct -- if there are no legal or practical remedies, to focus on the speech or behavior can only waste time and energy. That's what the PyCon episode ought to have taught all of us -- it was purely negative in its outcome, for all involved.
> That's a great way to avoid holding anyone accountable for their peers' behavior or their own behavior.
Read the history of the PyCon episode before deciding that sounding an alarm at every slight is a constructive choice. The PyCon episode (which was based on speech, not behavior) is a perfect example of what goes wrong when everything is reinterpreted as a gender issue. It also shows the danger of escalation -- when the reaction is a bigger offense than the original stimulus.
> The way to address this is to call people out on their sexist bullshit and force them to own it, not to ignore it and thereby grant tacit approval.
If I believed that, I would call people out on their clear (reverse) sexist bullshit expressed in this exchange. But it's not worth it -- it's not important, it's below my personal radar, and I have better ways to spend my time. But clearly this is not true for everyone, for example those desperate to retain their victim status at a time of declining justification and rationale for that perception and status.
Better to ask yourself which actions move women forward faster -- constructive engagement with activities that will improve the status of women, or unconstructive complaints about imagined slights, or as a recent correspondent put it here a week ago, "microaggressions".
When I read the "microaggressions" meme, I almost fell off my chair. How can anyone think reacting to "microaggressions" represents constructive behavior?
Bottom line -- if the activity is simple speech, not a direct action that discriminates, you're better off ignoring it. Oversensitivity -- turning everything into a gender issue -- does more harm than good. It falsely portrays women as powerless victims whose ascending status can be undermined by words.
Guess what? Men don't possess this kind of self-doubt. They don't start arguments, they start companies. All evidence says that women could easily do as well or better, if they choose.
> I don't think a man can speak on behalf of any female-identifying persons' "everyday reality."
After you get done building the make-believe wall between men and women you clearly intend to build and defend, start your own company. Let men experience a glass ceiling for a change. Or are you satisfied to complain about men without actually doing anything about it?
In all seriousness, a strategy of blaming men is a non-starter. It worked when women had no vote and no rights, but those days are long past. The "it's all the fault of men" meme has expired -- apart from being out of date, it lacks credibility.
Anyway my interest in this now annual survey (and the short-lived sexual orientation survey and the hypothetical race survey) is more self-serving and not so much about how to solve a problem. I'm interested in a profile on HN, as a community, to help me decide how much attention to pay / weight to give to elements of certain discussions here. If we're just a straight white dude monoculture then I want to factor that into my thinking. Come to think of it, I'd be interested to learn about the overall gender / age / ethnicity / sexual orientation / religion / country of origin demographics of other groups that I sometimes pay attention to (like Interesting People) especially when the community has a voting role in discussion moderation (like HN or reddit).
I'd actually be curious to see what kind of sexual orientation distribution there is also. I wonder if it'd fall in line with the general population.
Created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520651
(Edit: Not sure why this poll has been killed. It was created as a serious poll to satisfy my curiosity, not as backlash! It was actually yielding some really interesting information, in particular the higher proportion of non-straight people than is normal in the general population.)
(Edit again: now been unbanned!)
If you are both a woman and crass, and the person persists in annoying you, maybe try telling menstruation-themed jokes or anecdotes. But, if you are both a woman and crass, chances are you don't need me to tell you how to rid yourself of unwanted company.
The type of bigotry you just exhibited is way, way down the list of priorities. But most of the higher priorities are complicated and nuanced[0][1], but the thing you said is just straight-up wrong.
[0] E.g. affirmative action is complicated and nuanced.
[1] E.g. assuming a randomly-selected conventional-looking women at a tech convention is not a developer is... totally horrible, but also rational, given the distribution.
But don't let me deny you your savory helping of sanctimony there.
And actually, if counter-trolling is how you frame your comment, then I have to say, you're doing it wrong. The correct response to trolls is to silently downvote. This is called "don't feed the trolls", and it's the right strategy because genuine trolls are encouraged by counter-trolling, and this would result in more noise and less signal. Alternately you can try to say something that will be useful to other people, while still downvoting and ignoring the troll.
Then what is it you've been up to here while responding to me?
Your troll strategy is tiring lectures, while I opt for a slightly more economical approach. Potato, potato.
If you said that, if you took that position, I would strongly recommend that you do what you can to ignore those kinds of feelings.
It's my belief that women have a natural place in science and technology, but caring too much about social trivia and language (as with the recent PyCon episode) represents a pointless diversion that can only hold women back.
Would you want to be treated by a doctor who fainted at the sight of blood? I think you would prefer one who didn't care about that, who looked beyond it to something more important like a diagnosis and a cure. By the same token, people in science and technology need to be able to look beyond the petty annoyances and focus their attention on more important things.
Wouldn't it be ironic and deplorable if history recorded that an entire generation of highly skilled women didn't enter the ranks of modern science and technology because they sometimes overheard ambiguous remarks about "dongles", "forking" and "sausages"?
To say this in the most concise way, what price sanctimony?
And I doubt its a strict sexism problem, either. My engineer friends are the most negative group of friends I have. By miles.
Criticism is great, but the negative attitudes I see among them (and here, and Reddit) upset the hell out of me, and I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't as-big of a problem.
Idealists (as many in STEM are) who are smart is a deadly combination. You know just how terrible the world you live in is, and no matter how hard you work you keep hearing more bad news.
Sometimes I wish my brain had an off button so I can stop reading about North Korea (or remembering how "behind" I am from my peers) and instead go watch Celebrity Big Brother or whatever is showing today.
I find international politics interesting. Fear isn't really a motivation.
North Korea isn't itself very scary. What is scary is the fact that over decades they have threatened to attack everyone around them, and the surrounding powers have responded by extending food and economic aid, in a repeating pattern. The North Koreans know this -- they know it works -- so they do it again and again, and their citizens remain captives of a throwback regime. That's what's scary.
* Yes, I am going to hell. I am also working on a comic to bleed off my socially unacceptable jokes. Sorry. I could have resisted temptation. I just chose not to. Mmkay?
Edit: Or perhaps the disclaimer is the real joke, since I mostly meant the first part.
I'm not disagreeing that some women are scared away, but I can't fully expect that its the only reason for this gender imbalance.
As a guy, I can't really answer that. It'd take asking women outside of tech as to why they never considered it... Not just asking women in tech what they dislike about the gender imbalance in tech.
There is a lot of talk about what’s innate and what’s acquired. Characteristics we considered male or female for centuries are constantly being proven a result of nurture, either completely or by a large part, as tiny innate differences that grow intro troublesome gaps with social conditioning. Modern neuroscience keeps demonstrating how adaptable our brains are, and how society takes on the role of conditioning them on fixed gender roles from an incredibly young age. Have you ever noticed how gendered toys or child TV programmes are? How many people keep telling little girls they’re pretty and little boys that they’re smart or brave? That’s only the start of a rabbit hole that goes quite deep…
I don't think "scares away" is accurate. There are reasons women don't get into tech, but I don't think being scared is high on the list. I also think this will change over time -- I think social perceptions are changing and technical and scientific occupations are gradually being seen less as a male approach to processing reality and more gender-neutral.
For all our sakes, I hope this is true.
That's circular. It tries to say that women are a minority in tech because they drop out in larger numbers than men, because ... they're a minority. I don't this logic stands up under scrutiny.
The remedy is not to care about that. If I had to choose between being scared and having a boring life in which my gifts weren't fully exercised -- well, that would be much more scary. So even if we compare scary things, as I see it, being a member of a minority is rather low on the scary list.
What was interesting, is that there's 20% non-straight guys, which is 4-5 times higher than the general population. This is really interesting to me.
I think it got flagged to death because it came across as backlash, which it wasn't.
The same can be said about how stereotypes, personality types and culture scares away certain races, certain subcultures, certain age groups etc.
It's not as simple as "scares away half the population"; it might be so much as "scares away 95% of the population", of which there is an unknown percentage that would not be scared if some small part of any part of how tech looks to the outside changed.
And then there's a question of how many of those are really scared off.
I'm not saying it's a problem if there are a lot of trans women here, it's just it would be highlighting a problem if there aren't a lot of cis women here in comparison, because that would mean tech was scaring women away and the only ones who were here are the ones who had been unfortunate enough to have had male childhoods.
(I'm worried this will come off as horribly bigoted or something, I don't know, I hope people can see what I'm getting at)
Edit: Fuck you downvoters. Yes, I know it's socially unacceptable to question someone's "identity". I don't care. That identity is a lie. He's a woman because he likes women's clothing just like I'm black because I love me some fried chicken.
If you differentiate between biological sex and gender as social construct (what you call "made-up"), what is your objection to someone having a "made-up" gender identity that is different from the more common gender identity of others born with their same sex?
Also, you clearly don't know anything about trans people if you think it's as simple as "dressing up like a girl".
However, that doesn't state your gender definitively. Intersexed folks exist, people who were mistakenly mis-assigned gender by their genitals exist, and you can change your legal gender, at least where I live.
Do you mean "legally a man", or "medically a man"? It is trivial to conceive of legal systems that fly in the face of what is plainly reality. The law can, and at various times and places has been, written by bigots and/or the uninformed. Who cares how it classifies things?
As for "medically a man", while it is possible to be "medically a man" or "medically a woman", for any reasonable definition of "medically", there are more than those two options.
Your comment seems to suggest that you don't realize that one's legal gender status can and often does follow one's gender identity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_aspects_of_transsexualism
There's not one legal question, but many. If you live in a jurisdiction with different rights by sex-or-gender, which rights do you get? If you live in a jurisdiction with legal heterosexual marriage but illegal homosexual marriage, who may you marry? If you represent yourself as (fe)male to someone who cares, are you committing fraud? When contracts legally discriminate between genders (e.g. maybe scholarships for one gender only?), do you get to choose which gender you are for those contracts?
There're medical questions: if sex is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness, what should you be telling your doctor? What should E.R. techs do? What if _gender_ is a useful predictor of therapeutic effectiveness? (Consider difficult cases like this: someone who is XY but was gender-reassigned in infancy to female (it has happened!), and raised female, and believes emself female.... which pathologies will follow male distributions, which will follow female, which will be something else?)
There're public-space social questions: which washrooms can you enter, which changerooms? (mutatis mutandis for other gendered public spaces). Can you attend girls-night-out? (Some friends-of-friends do a ladies night that includes transwomen; when I've met them, I'm inclined to think of them as dudes. How limited of me.)
And then, arguably most important, there're private social questions. We've already mostly worked out (at least in the left-leaning parts of the West) that neither sex nor gender determines who you want to have sex with, and that's probably fine (I personally think it's 100% fine!), but baby that's just the tip of the complicated iceberg. What do you do if you have an Adam's apple, and big hands, but you also have breasts, and you want to find people to discuss bra-sizing with?
tl;dr: gender and sex are complicated, and there are 2 defaults that seem to mostly-work for maybe 80%-95% of the population, and then a few more semi-defaults that work for maybe 80%-95% of those left, and then a few more defaults that work for maybe 90% of those left, and so on. And this shit matters to people, seriously. Don't be a dumbass by saying "oh it's as simple as X".
Are you this website owner ? so in the name of whom are you saying i should not hit the comment button ? who do you think you are ?
Laws are what we make them, they do not influence the nature of reality.
What I, for the life of me, cannot understand is why someone, after being informed of it, would reject the notion entirely. Where does that come from? How does someone ascribe so much importance to the concept of a gender/sex binary? Just imagine if people reacted the same to the concept of political ideologies neither republican nor democrat... I cannot fathom it, nor any reason for it.
B) People who have an emotional response to sexuality and gender are usually the ones who have repressed issues regarding their sexuality and gender identity. It's a touchy situation. On one hand I want to call you out for being a bigot on the other I feel sympathetic and wish you the best.
I think it isn't "tech" that's the problem. I think it is "the old boys club" atmosphere, which can be changed.
Thanks for chiming in.
For the record, she said that everyone was really open and comfortable with it, and one of the first things her boss did was make sure that all her IDs and employee records were updated to reflect her actual gender identity, which was awesome.
As a female in Computer Science I am legitimately curious.
I guess you can post here or shoot me an email (my gmail starts with talithamichele).
Thanks.
Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you and codegeek's reply is correct.
These are not the droids you are looking for. Move along. No need to argue about a stray misunderstanding. ;-)
[edit: I just realised I told him/her the gender of a different guy. He/she wanted gender of OP some other post :-) ]
English is so limited. We need more forms of "you." I might need to revive my old habit of using the Southern "y'all" online to make things like that clearer.
Anyways, I think my username makes my gender fairly obvious. :-)
Thanks for chiming in.
This is despite being female and sometimes frequenting majority-female channels.
I use male singular pronouns for people whose sex I'm not aware of because English male singular pronouns are actually also its neuter singular pronouns (I believe this is true for several other major languages, as well). Hence, for a noun that has gender, but whose gender is unknown, the correct pronoun is "he", rather than some silly construction such as "he/she" or the at worst flagrantly incorrect, at best vastly confusing singular "they". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Universa...)
"One" is also a reasonable alternative, though its odd construction means it can't be used as a drop-in replacement, and it can often sound awkward, overly formal, or antiquated.
When political correctness became a big deal, people bent over backwards to avoid using "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun, overcorrecting so much that they forgot that "he" isn't necessarily masculine (the universal "he" started losing favor in the 1960s). It was similar to the guy that got fired for saying "niggardly" (a synonym for stingy) because it sounds like "nigger", despite the fact that the similarities are meaningless and entirely coincidental.
Depending on how PC the crowd is, I'll sometimes use one of the incorrect constructions to avoid ill-placed ire.
Interestingly, Baltimore primary school students have started using "yo" as a neutral third person singular (http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx - Warning: autoplaying audio ads, and a fullscreen ad that covers the page on load). While I don't like "yo" for purely subjective reasons, it is an interesting linguistic development.
EDIT: fixed the spelling of "niggardly". Thanks, jcromartie.
> I use male singular pronouns for people whose sex I'm not aware of because English male singular pronouns are actually also its neuter singular pronouns (I believe this is true for several other major languages, as well). Hence, for a noun that has gender, but whose gender is unknown, the correct pronoun is "he", rather than some silly construction such as "he/she" or the at worst flagrantly incorrect, at best vastly confusing singular "they". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Universa...)
I have a few bones to pick with this.
It's not the case that "he" is "the correct pronoun". First of all, any competent grammar nerd recognizes that correctness in language is defined by the consensus of fluent users (yes, that's a circular definition, get over it), and there's an open debate in English about what is a correct pronoun for unknown-gender individuals.
Also, "they" is not "flagrantly incorrect", and it's often perfectly clear. (It's certainly not always clear, but neither is "he".) It has a 500-year history, and I think the general rule is "Good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me." If you're happy with WP as a source, I give you the very next section in the same article you linked:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Singular...
Or http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.h...
> It's not the case that "he" is "the correct pronoun".
I didn't so much mean "the one true way" as "a valid and IMO way". I realize this wasn't clear in my initial comment.
> First of all, any competent grammar nerd recognizes that correctness in language is defined by the consensus of fluent users.
True - I agree wholeheartedly. I meant more that that has been the primary (or at least a major) usage historically, and its rejection due to PC was and is unnecessary and destructive. I tend towards grammatical conservatism when it comes to my own usage, but I don't care how other people use it, so long as it's actually valid English (I recognize informal usage and dialects such as the creole-esque inner-city AAVS as distinct entities, so I wasn't really intending to discuss them).
In addition, I'd argue that it has far greater usage than one might think. Style guides purposely follow the most PC usage in order to be as widely applicable as possible, and most major public writing avoids the usage because many people take offense at its usage, and it's easier and simpler to just avoid the usage than to try to deal with them. Thus, its public usage is specifically lowered. This end up resulting in, at least in my experience, its actual usage being far higher than what would normally be apparent from its public usage.
> Also, "they" is not "flagrantly incorrect", and it's often perfectly clear. (It's certainly not always clear, but neither is "he".) It has a 500-year history, and I think the general rule is "Good enough for Shakespeare, good enough for me."
"Flagrantly" was overstating my point, as was "at best". Sorry, I get caught up in my own rhetoric sometimes. It strains desperately against the grammar ("A person walked to the car, and someone hit them" sounds ok, but "Bob walked to the car, and someone hit them" does not. Most third-person singular gender-neutral pronouns still make sense, even if the gender is known). At least to me, it's far less clear than "he", as ambiguity of number is almost always more confusing than ambiguity of gender. It is certainly acceptable in informal and semi-formal usage, but I'd argue against its usage in formal English, particularly when there are better options available (formal usage doesn't usually care about verbosity, so "one" can be used for almost any situation, if necessary).
As for Shakespeare, as with any other fiction writer (particularly one that writes poetry, as grammar must often bend to fit the needs of meter and rhyme), there are vast numbers of constructions that he uses that I would be uncomfortable with using in formal English - and many I'd be uncomfortable using at all. (Looking at you, Brian Jacques, and your interminable and frequent run-on sentences in your post-Redwall books.) In addition, many of his usages are archaic, even for someone as grammatically conservative as myself. You clearly aren't writing like Shakespeare now, so your rule of thumb seems to be a bit of an anachronism.
As for 500-year history, "y'all" goes back at least 150-200 years, and it's completely incorrect. (I kid, I kid. I don't like "y'all", but it's just me being ornery.)
For purely practical reasons, I don't think it's a good idea to go around saying "niggardly", and I acknowledge that some people use it in order to offend. The point I intended to imply was simply that it was PC overcorrection when they fired the guy (I don't believe he was trying to offend, but my memory's not perfect.)
I'd be interested in others' thoughts on this.
update: yes, female here! and long time hn reader, like years.
I can't say I'm surprised, but that's more than 13x. I didn't know it was that bad.
I've a lot of people who are very much dear to me who identify as non-binary, so I was thrilled to see the great support for the other option. As predictable for trans/cis discussions, a real jerk emerged from the woodwork, but the general support is great too!
Regarding the general topic of LGBT+ people (now that the other poll has been killed), if you're a queer hacker in the UK, feel free to get in touch!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5482013
for a recent posting of a FAQ on the subject. I have no doubt that there are more male than female participants here, and no idea what the actual ratio is.
(Most online communities I participate in, including my circle of Facebook friends, have a strong female majority. That's because many of those online communities pertain to education policy, and mothers care more about that issue than fathers, on average, at least as to online participation in discussion of policy.)
At first, I was afraid to answer this poll truthfully because of the recent "gender issues" our scene has faced. But reading through the comments...yes, we (as always) dwelved into the "gender stuff" again but all involved parties managed to have a decent and civilized discussion.
Which made me realize: what our community really needs to improve isn't "red cards", "women-only events", "enforced talks parity" or any other stuff that's just dividing us further. What our community needs is civilized discussion.
There are other answers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender
Edit: Thanks for adding other.
Just because you don't feel something, doesn't mean you can dismiss the mindset of others. Many people feel and demonstrate that gender is separate from sex and can be very much non-binary. It surely exists, whether you like it or not.
poof
Whoa, my bank account balance... it's true!
Thanks, stranger. Want some of my new money?
But I'm pretty lonely in that opinion.
Not like most people even check which chromosomes people have.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520651
[2] I have no idea why
EDIT: Added it on public demand.
You should just add another option and ignore the haters.
(edit: thanks)
Now I'm curious about the fraction of "other"
I quite doubt there are 15 other to 42 female (to 735 male).
Other than http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ and specific gender/sex studies, I haven't seen studies that make a distinction between gender and sex. Of course, if you want to make the distinction about biological sex, then you have to define which of the biological criteria and categories you're using, and even then you need more than two categories (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html).
You seem to suggest that my interpretation is arbitrary, while I think it is the most colloquial. Do you honestly think that a 15 year old girl/boy would see this thread and think "well I am neither of those"? Or are you just deconstructing a very straightforward question by its edge cases to prove some kind of point that I'm missing?
Sorry it's such a big deal to you.
(heterosexual male upper-middle class white American here...)
But thanks.