Comment by a3_nm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by a3_nm | Hacker News Reader

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I had a similar moment of realization about gender equality once. I used to believe that IRC was a very nice medium because the gender of the participants was not revealed (unless they wanted to), so (I thought) it was entirely free from gender prejudices.

Then, I discussed with someone on the channel of a hackspace I used to go to (but had just started attending so I didn'n know the people well); I had never seen the guy IRL but he said he would attend the next session so I could figure out who he was in real life.

But when I come, none of the participants were him. And then a female participant shows up and a while later it turns out that "he" is her, and I was shocked to see how unexpected this felt.

I'm not implying that the IRC user being female was in any way shocking, nor did I believe that the women who had joined us (and, this time, the only female participant around) could not be a "real" participant to a hackspace. It's just that, while I had wondered of every participant whether it was that IRC guy or not, I just hadn't made the connection for her.

And, thus, I realized that, without even noticing it, no matter my opinions about gender prejudices, I must have had a pretty strong mental image of that IRC user being male, for me to be so surprised when she turned out to be female. IRC wasn't gender-neutral. It was male by default.

I'm not sure how related to the discussion this is, but for me this was the moment when I realized that prejudices weren't just something that stupid people did, and that I was also influenced by them even if (especially if) I didn't notice.

It's a problem I have with hacker news comments as well...

Are there any statistics how many participants here are male, female, etc.?

I just assume something about 95% male commenters so I automatically assume a boy or a man on the other side of the conversation. Which probably is a rather bad assumption :/

IRC is gender neutral.

You made a foolish assumption. Not everyone does that, or even cares in the slightest what a users gender/age/cultural background/disability/whatever is.

All you have done is reveal your own past personal prejudice. Congratulations on getting over that.

(Yes, of course, I'm not claiming that this is a flaw of IRC, or anybody's fault but mine.)

> IRC is gender neutral.

So you read about someone's experience proving otherwise (I have had similar experiences on IRC, getting treated shitty for being a woman) and you stated something else in an authoritarian fashion, without feeling the slightest need to prove your point. How... interesting.

Saying his personal experience proves anything about IRC as a medium is a stretch.

No requirement exists to give your gender or a name that may reveal a gender. That, by any definition, is 'gender neutral'.

If someone makes assumptions about other people it's their own issue, it has nothing to do with what is essentially an anonymous medium. I really didn't think it needed 'proving'.

Of course you didn't think that. I think your confusion stems from the fact that, when speaking about IRC, one speaks also about the community that uses IRC -- without the people using IRC, it would be useless, since its aim is to make communication possible. I'm a bit surprised this wasn't taken into account.

> That, by any definition, is 'gender neutral'.

No, because women receive shit and most users are considered male by default.

> Saying his personal experience proves anything about IRC as a medium is a stretch.

His experiences are not the only ones that exist. At least a couple female IRC users I know carefully chose handles that do not reveal their gender, because they wanted to spare themselves all the negative comments they received before the handle change.

Why do you need to tell people your gender on a communications medium that doesn't require you to? I don't consider anyone to be male or female on IRC, they're just users.

The thing I always loved about IRC was that even when I was 12 years old, people took me seriously, not because I was male, or white, or an adult, but because I was thoughtful and intelligent - age in this case being the key differentiating factor.

Disgusting sexist people exist. If you tell them your gender they may well attack you for it, because they are terrible people. What are we debating here? The only assertion I've made is that IRC is inherently gender neutral by definition.

So the thing you might be missing is that even when you think you're being appreciated for your intelligence, people have still been assuming that you are both white and male (and on IRC back in the day, probably a teen or young adult).

It's folly to think that you are free of prejudice with the only basis that you don't consciously hold these prejudices, because we (humanity, science) know for a fact that biases are much more deeply ingrained in most of us.

This is particularly hard for our demographic (programmers et al) to hear, because we consider ourselves rational. We like to think that we do things because we have thought them through. But all evidence points to the fact that we are just as susceptible to biases and prejudice as everyone else. Indeed, nobody seems to be free of it, but there is a silver lining: with an analytical approach, it is possible to examine biases and become aware of them, and eventually work through them.

How can you possibly make this generalisation? On IRC, people can assume whatever they like. Everyone might as well be naked running around doing the tango, if that is how that person chooses to see those users.

Why would a person even give a microseconds thought on whether or not I was white, black, male, female, whatever, and even if they do -- why is it _my_ responsibility as person putting the content out there to be one or the other?

It's not.

You're right one one point - programmers do consider themselves to be rational. IRC is one place where biases simply don't exist by definition, because why would they? Nothing defining anything exists unless you explicitly want it to.

I find it extremely irking that you keep trying to insinuate that literally every person on IRC thinks of each other as a 'white male' like you describe. This reveals a problem, not systemic, but in yourself.

I don't think he's saying that there's anything fundamentally not neutral about IRC as a technical product. I think he's pointing out that the fact that it is gender neutral from a technical point of view does not mean that the experience is gender neutral in practice, because, as you've pointed out, people bring their own biases to the medium.

I believe his point is he realized that technology alone does not obviate sociological issues, after being confronted with his own bias in an unanticipated way.

Yes, this seems like a very clean way to phrase what I intended to say.

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