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

[Sai Emrys]

On Fri, Sep 18, 2009 at 2:59 AM, maymay <bitetheappleback at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Agreed.

> "Do you want to get busy with a person who has a penis?"

Not really, IMO. For instance, pre-op MTF trannies (aka "chicks with
dicks") are almost exclusively a straight male thing.

So I think it is more accurate to say that people are looking for
specific gender(s), broadly.

> This algorithm has a ton more assumptions in it from a technical standpoint
> than I think necessary,

"A ton"? Enh... not sure about that. I think it's fair to say that the
majority of people are into one standard gender or the other. Those
who aren't probably list themselves as bi, and that moots that issue.
('cause bi actually means 'no preference' in this context; insert
nonduality spiel here.)

> 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.

What about the above trannies, who identify as female and are mostly
sought by straight males, despite their having cocks?

For that matter: the more questions you ask, the more people go away.
You simply cannot expect to be able to ask all your users a long
inventory.

More especially, you cannot ask all your users questions that
presuppose that they have a genderqueer identity. Most do not. Shoving
something like that on them inherently makes a sociopolitical
statement, and my apps at least try to be studiously neutral on
anything not directly related to the functionality.

> but I think you and I both know that "good enough" code is often
> pretty damn lousy when examined more closely.

Of course. But why would you?

Especially when dealing with something when the reality is
impossible-to-categorize-ly complex, all you want to even think about
is 'good enough'.

> 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….)

Indeed. And even those categories are insufficient; at some point you
have to make it a generic text entry, and then you know you've lost
any categorization utility. :-P

> 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

How about this: propose a better system. What ought a site like
OKCupid do that's practical and better - both for questions of users'
gender and what they're looking for?

> 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.

FWIW, I do full stack work - everything from making the (simple)
graphics to optimizing database calls to ... well, everything.

So I actually use those terms pretty interchangeably; I'm used to
being me, as it were.

> 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."

I don't know whether it's unfortunate or not. But certainly it's true.

IME: never expect normal people to be introspective, or to be aware of
(let alone care about) tricky issues of identity. It just ain't true
often enough.

And bluntly, not enough people give a damn what your gender "really"
is; they just want to know what categories they can use that will
more-or-less accurately predict how they should interact with you.

Like I said, I see that sort of thing as something that comes up in
one-on-one nonsuperficial relationships. Not that one can handle even
en masse of one's acquaintances, let alone programmatically across
millions of users.

- Sai