[UbuntuWomen] Gender and email [was: Free Ego :)

[Vid Ayer]

Hi,

and welcome Kadambari !

On Wed, Apr 30, 2008 at 1:19 PM, Fred H Olson <fholson at cohousing.org> wrote:
>  your simply reading your intro ** was, what is your gender.  The next
>  question was, does it matter? or  is there a legitimate reason I need to
>  know the gender of participants here?

Good question !

>  In the US we can often tell the gender of people by their name and that
>  extends to email.  Come to think of it we probably guess wrong sometimes.
>  And there are cases of people intentionally misleading correspondents as
>  to their gender.

Well, i wonder why publicizing one's gender even matters. I dont think
women (or men) should be forced to reveal their gender (or any
personal info which they are not comfortable revealing in public) and
usually the name is a dead giveaway. In my case, my full name reveals
my gender, country and some years ago after a few instances of
harassment, i switched to using a gender-neutral nick online. It saved
me the stress of dealing with creepiness online.


>  So I ask the list
>
>  Is there a legitimate reason for participants to know the gender of people
>  who post here?

Imho, not required. UW does not discriminate along gender. You may be
surprised to know that one of the admins of this list is male.

Personally speaking, in the technical/free software community, I :
- dont think knowing the gender/location/age/country of the person in
a tech community should matter at all.
- prefer to be known by my work, thoughts, ideas, contributions,
etc... rather than being judged on the basis of my gender,



>  Your blog/userinfo mentions your gender.

hmm... now that you mention it i realise that it would have been
tougher to find that info (gender/personal stuff) in my blog some
years ago. I avoid it and (thankfully) people dont complain but then i
am a sporadic blogger anyway :-)



>  Reminds me of the online book I found yesterday (that was written by
>  another Indian) in precisely this spirit:
>  _A Byte of Python_ by Swaroop, C H http://www.byteofpython.info
>  > This book will help you to learn the Python programming language,
>  > whether you are new to computers or are an experienced programmer.

...amen that :)

Vid
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