[Noisebridge-discuss] Gender & Technology followups from 5Mof

[maymay]

On Sep 18, 2009, at 2:12 AM, Sai Emrys wrote:

> I really enjoyed your talk.

Thanks! :) I enjoyed yours.[0]

> To follow up on our followup, something I
> was just thinking.
>
> IMHO, from real world experience writing and maintaining a major app
> w/ a hookup-my-users part to it: As a web app developer, I don't
> really *care* about what your gender is, in detail. As a person, I do.
>
> As a dev, what is important to me is what *groups* you belong to - how
> I can lump you with other people and thereby treat you in some way
> that's useful to us both. If I were to take an exhaustive
> self-inventory of gender expression, that would be perhaps useful on a
> profile page or the like - something where you are communicating on a
> one on one basis with other people - but for coding purposes, groups
> of one are worse than useless (because they're clutter).
>
> And nobody is going to tell me "hey I'm looking for a [insert your
> particular genderqueerness here]". They might, however, tell me "I'm
> into the 'other' gendered people". (Note, the same is true of any
> other trait you might care to name, like religion, sex drive, type of
> humor, etc. Only the first pass is really useful as a filter, unless
> you start getting into more sophisticated stuff like OKCupid's
> question-matching algorithm, where the answer to any particular
> question isn't especially important, and they're used in a more
> large-scale-correlation fashion.)

Right. What any given entity ("you") cares about is contextual. This  
is why it's so important to get the purpose of information-gathering  
correct. If you get it wrong, then you're just wasting effort since  
you're effectively feeding potentially incorrect assumptions right  
into your data set. That's not going to be helpful to anyone, either.

One of the strange things about OkCupid is that they seem to have this  
flexible, nuanced, individualistic question-matching algorithm but  
fall flat on their face by perpetuating a male/female dichotomy. What  
they are probably asking (as a hypothetical example) is, "Do you want  
to get busy with a person who has a penis?" However, rather than just  
ask that in a direct manner, they use an algorithm similar to this:

  if user == (male && gay)
     user wants cock
  if user == (male && straight)
     user wants cunt
   …

This algorithm has a ton more assumptions in it from a technical  
standpoint than I think necessary, and I'm certain that this sort of  
construction influences the way that OkCupid's match selection process  
works. I'd feel better about OkCupid if instead of assuming that all  
people who self-identify as "male" have penises as well as assuming  
that this is the way every person will interpret the question "Are you  
male or female?" that they were explicit about what they were asking.  
Doing that might also make OkCupid's question-matching algorithm  
better, too, although that's just conjecture on my part.

> So I'd like to draw a distinction between how you identify, as a
> complex sociopolitical yada yada, and how others identify *you* as a
> first pass.

Again, yeah, and I hope I didn't imply that there's something  
fundamentally wrong about the way things work today, because I  
generally believe that most systems, including gender, are "good  
enough" systems for a majority population, but I think you and I both  
know that "good enough" code is often pretty damn lousy when examined  
more closely.

> Yes, it's pigeonholing, but that is a necessary thing to do because we
> can't predictively guess all the details of all the possible variants
> we might come across. Coded categories are for rough, first pass sorts
> of filtering; anything more detailed and ornate - and difficult to
> sort - has to take place after that, when you get to know the person
> that the yenta picked out as a plausible match. I'm fine with having
> catchall categories (e.g. relationship status 'complicated' or
> 'partnered but available [under some circumstances]'; gender 'other';
> etc etc), but categorize you I must, or I do neither of us a favor.

I think the Yay! Genderform web site is a perfect example of why  
trying to provide every single possible option in an application that  
doesn't need to know too much about sexuality information is a bad  
idea. :) The UI is simply unusable and there's an ontology problem  
here, too. (And not to complicate things further but note that  
Facebook and FetLife's examples implement the same values  
["male","female"…] in a form field with a different label; Facebook  
calls "male" a "sex" while FetLife calls "male" a "gender". Who's  
correct? Not sure….)

So, I'm not really arguing against categorization. I've worked as an  
information architect before; I love categories. :) What I'm arguing  
for is more attention to a very fundamental categorization scheme that  
we don't know how much we don't know about yet, one that's so  
important to the fabric of our society that we've built real systems,  
like marriages databses, while overlooking the gender-biased  
assumptions in a severe way. As an example, do you remember when "web  
design" was pretty much everything to do with getting web site online?  
That was a whole category in and of itself. Now we have "web  
developer" versus "web designer" and even within there we have  
specialities like "back end developer" and "front end developer," if  
you'll pardon my crude terms here.

I think it's unfortunate that a site like LinkedIn can, for example,  
subdivide their "Industry" dropdown menu with a plethora of diverse  
options—completely sensical on a site ostensibly trying to improve the  
nature of your business's presentation—but doing something similar  
with a sex or gender drop down menu on a dating site like OkCupid  
might actually alienate the non-genderqueer-friendly population  
because somehow looking beyond a binary is "wrong." So yah, there's a  
bit of politics involved here, and it's a bit of a chicken-and-egg  
arms race, too.

> Thoughts?
>
> - Sai
>
> PS FWIW, I'm very queer-friendly but not queer-political; I don't see
> my own (moderately neutral/androgynous) gender as something I make a
> big deal of. But as I said, there's me-me and
> dealing-with-300k-users-me, and those are very different perspectives.


This wasn't the most coherent email I've ever written but I hope it  
gives you some more follow ups. I should also mention that many of the  
points I'm trying (and maybe not succeeding) to make in this email  
were also at least touched on by that hour-long Sex 2.0 presentation  
recording,[1] which has more detail, so I'd love to hear your thoughts  
on that, too, if you're so inclined.

And now I need to sleep and not wake up for a lot of hours. :)

Cheers,
-maymay
Blog: http://maybemaimed.com
Community: http://KinkForAll.org
Volunteering: http://ConversioVirium.org/author/maymay

EXTERNAL REFERENCES:

[0] http://identi.ca/notice/10267575
[1] http://blip.tv/file/2107646/