I think it's fair to say that many of the women here are not obviously women except where it's mentioned in maybe one percent of their posts. There are even a couple that I knew were women but would forget until the next time it was mentioned or hinted at.

For most discussions here (the "love" forums comprising most of the exceptions), the sex of the posters really doesn't matter.

Granted, this is less of a problem in this specific board than in...well, really, than in *any* other I've encountered to date, but the fact that it's so prevalant elsewhere conditions many women to just not mention that they are women.

And really -- outside of the specific context of the Looking for Love categories, why does it really matter? Discussion boards are about words and ideas, and both men and women, given sufficient intelligence, are capable of stringing those together in interesting ways.

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Originally posted by Akira:
And really -- outside of the specific context of the Looking for Love categories, why does it really matter?

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Originally posted by macman:
while there are a lot of geeks out there, there seems to be a certain lack of geekesses.

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Originally posted by Akira:
Also, I know many female geeks that prefer to remain anonymous of that identifier in Internet forums because there are certain hazards associated with it -- namely tons of horny male geeks constantly barraging you with requests for cybersex.

Granted, this is less of a problem in this specific board than in...well, really, than in *any* other I've encountered to date, but the fact that it's so prevalant elsewhere conditions many women to just not mention that they are women.

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:

I think it's fair to say that many of the women here are not obviously women except where it's mentioned in maybe one percent of their posts.

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No kidding. I've cauhgt people referring to me as a "he" at least once. Guess that's what I get for naming myself aafter a chemical!

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Originally posted by Geordie:
Because English does not have an accepted gender neutral third person pronoun.

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Originally posted by Demosthenes:
i notice that, too. not as much on these forums, but in real-life, there seems to be a much lower concentration of female geeks. no wonder the vast majority of my friends are male.

i've always wondered why. hmnh.

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At least partly, it's just statistics conspiring against you. Even if the male:female ratio were 1:1, the average person, regardless of sex, would feel left out in the cold.

The math is simple enough. Suppose you divide a population with equal numbers of men and women into groups of three. One eighth of the groups will have three women, three eighths will have two, three eighths will have one, and one eighth will have none.

Fully one quarter of the women in our artificial example will be in a group with no men. Half the women will be in a group where they outnumber men by 2:1, and only a quarter will be in a group where they are outnumbered by men 2:1. (Obviously no women will be in an all-male group.) So, only a quarter of the women see the male:female ratio skewed in their favor, and fully three-quarters see it skewed against them. The men have the same problem.

In real life, it's not nearly that extreme, and social groups do tend to be bigger than three, but the tendency of couples to pair off makes the effective group size smaller again so most single people are still likely to see more single people of their own sex than of the opposite sex in their social groups.

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Originally posted by homesalad:
I made one up once, it was [b]tra. It worked pretty well, but usually I forgot to use it. Saying he/she never really worked for me.[/B]

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Someone I went to college with assured me that the "accepted" gender neutral pronouns were "sie" for she/he and "hir" for his/her.

I've heard of "hir", its etymology is fairly self-evident, and it works equally well for his/her and him/her -- at least in writing (it's a one-off spelling of any of those pronouns). Verbally, it comes across too much like "her" (or at least it does for us lazy pronouncers who rarely distinguish between a soft "e" and a soft "i"). "Sie" is a new one to me, and its only obvious etymology is from German, but there it's the feminine pronoun (IIRC -- too many years since my one semester of German); isn't "es" the neuter pronoun?

Okay, here's a question: how is this issue handled in languages where *everything* has an explicit gender?

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cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:

Okay, here's a question: how is this issue handled in languages where *everything* has an explicit gender?

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Well that should be pretty obvious. You simply use whatever's appropriate for the noun your using.
For example in Spanish, when you're talking about a group of people, unless you specifically know that they are all women you use the masculine (or at least that's how I was taught). That's for plural.

For singular, the way you do it (at least in Bulgarian), if you are talking about a person (any person), the word person is masculine so you use that form. If you are talking about a nurse, the general form of the word nurse is feminine so you use that form. Much less ambiguity.(and you can see where some prejudice comes in)

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Originally posted by EngrBohn:
I've heard of "hir", its etymology is fairly self-evident, and it works equally well for his/her and him/her -- at least in writing (it's a one-off spelling of any of those pronouns). Verbally, it comes across too much like "her" (or at least it does for us lazy pronouncers who rarely distinguish between a soft "e" and a soft "i"). "Sie" is a new one to me, and its only obvious etymology is from German, but there it's the feminine pronoun (IIRC -- too many years since my one semester of German); isn't "es" the neuter pronoun?

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In German 'sie' is the polite form for both masculine and feminine pronoun (like 'you' in English, if I remember my high school German right) and also the pronoun for feminine gender (like 'she'). I've always found these latter day constructs of 'sie' and 'hir' in English (almost exclusively American English) to be silly in the extreme.

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Originally posted by Oldguy geek:
In German 'sie' is the polite form for both masculine and feminine pronoun (like 'you' in English, if I remember my high school German right) and also the pronoun for feminine gender (like 'she').

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In German, "Sie" [capital "S"] is the formal second-person pronoun ("you"), which is gender-neutral, but I can't think of any Western language that has different forms of the second-person pronoun(s) depending on gender. (I don't think either the Germanic or Romance languages do.) "sie" [lower-case "s"] is both the singular third-person feminine and the gender-neutral third-person plural.

whew!

(Obviously, German pronouns are very versatile...and that was just covering the nominative case. )

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Originally posted by Geordie:
Because English does not have an accepted gender neutral third person pronoun.

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er, well Transgender humans kinda have this problem - like if they havent *completely* changed - I often revert to 'human', or use (semi) accepted pronouns like SHe and Hir

..Ooops, sorry I came in late here,(started firing off & didnt read the whole topic) - yeah I guess finding something thats *phonetically* gender neutral is kinda tricky
(and Sie is a new one on me)

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Originally posted by TrygveLode:
In German, ... "sie" [lower-case "s"] is both the singular third-person feminine [b]and the gender-neutral third-person plural.[/B]

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Thanks, it's been more than 30 years since I studied this stuff, and I am surprised I remembered it as well as I did.

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�Like most efforts at language reform, these well-intended suggestions have been largely ignored by the general English-speaking public, and the project to supplement the English pronoun system has proved to be an ongoing exercise in futility

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Geordie