Slashdot Mirror
Females Outnumber Males Online
westcoaster004 writes "In news which may surprise some Slashdot users, females have been found to outnumber males online in the U.S. according to a report, and for some time. The statistics for Canadians show a slightly greater number of male users."
I don't see any age distribution in TFA (just "over 3"), but I have a sneaking suspicion that 2/3 of those are over the age of 50. In other words, granny discovered e-mail and how to order knitting needles online.
And just how is this funny? Granny is no less a woman with her knitting needles than the young, hot, smoking blond of the average slashdotter's hopeless fantasies and probably has more sex than the average slashdotter anyway (with any being more than none).
And why isn't Granpa online and Granny is? Is Granny smarter than Granpa? Was Granny more able to adapt to online culture better? Why? Isn't it enough that she is able to search, navigate, compare, order and pay for her purchases? Isn't it enough that now she talks to her grandchildren every week through IM or email than never with snail mail and not being able to afford cross-country visits?
The fact that she is able to make use of the internet to improve or enjoy her life isn't enough? Granny has to be a programer, 3l33t haxor, network admin and security expert too? Does Granny have to be Uber Elder Geek to be counted as an online personage?
For people who are supposed to be geeks, you and the people who modded you up seem to be awfully narrow minded. Tech is not for just the people you think are worthy enough to be counted.
When you no longer feel compelled to assign a gender and race to a person for anything about that person, you also might find yourself not assuming things about this person. For anything about a specific person that you do not know, would you subconsciously start to fill the knowledge gap by drawing what you don't know from a stereotype?
Try this...(and only as an experiment), for people you don't know that you come across in your day (people on the street, customers at your business, customers over the phone, etc), try and guess what kind of music they like. Use whatever information you have about them to discern their music tastes (obviously without clueing them in that your doing this). But after you've made your guess, write down their seen (or perceived over the phone) skin color, gender, and music preference you came up with. You will probably want to keep this list of yours out of sight, or in a password protected word document or something. Spreadsheet maybe?
At the end of a few days, go through your list and first divide people up by gender, and group the males together, and the female together. For each gender, make a subgroup for each race (whites, blacks, asians, etc.). After that, go through and write down the different kinds of music you assigned (Country, rap, gospel, etc), and then after that, go back and tally up how many black males like X, or how many white females like Y, and so on. I'm almost certain that one music taste in particular will have a majority in each group. Like you might see that you have far more black females listening to gospel than any other kind of music in that group.
You now have a successfully stereotyped gender and race bias for music tastes. You have asked no one what they actually like, just what you think they would like to listen to. Since you didn't actually ask anyone what they liked, your list is probably highly inaccurate. But because you took the time to classify these people according to their gender and race, and then see what music they liked, you have willfully imposed a condition that requires you to discriminate based on race and gender. Should you do this test, you might conclude that had you not first identified their race and gender, your assumptions about their music tastes would be absolutely anyone's wild guess, because without their race and gender, you know nothing about that person, including their music tastes.
Since you didn't have any actual information, how did you have any faith in your guess even being remotely close to accurate? What gave you any confidence in your judgment? Since you had no information about a person, you had to have taken some of your guesswork from a preconceived notion of what you learned in life. For example, you probably were not consciously aware of it, but you limited all the possible types of music a person could enjoy, from what people of that race and gender you know already like. I bet your list will not have these entries...
And you are probably thinking that those music tastes are absurd for those people, but do you think this because you have never heard or known an asian female to like salsa, a black male to like yodeling, or a hispanic male to like polish folk? Or do
---FourChannel---
You fit in whatever category you believe yourself to belong to. I don't see it fit to label you.
:)
My aim in my previous post, was not "these kinds of people won't like this kind of music." That would be stereotypical of me, and I don't believe it to be true. My aim was to show that given no information, someone who was trying to guess another person's music tastes using only their race and gender would likely avoid linking, for example, a hispanic male with Polish folk.
I was trying to point out that since this made up list of ours is complete conjecture, we only have our stereotypes to look to when we try to label people. Because we are drawing our guesses from a stereotype, we're not going to put on the list something that doesn't match a stereotype.
I wrote what I did in my previous post, not to encourage, but to show the huge flaw in trying to categorize people when you don't actually know anything about them. I posted what I did to help people realize that labeling people is a bad practice, and I understand that the great grandparent post might have been sarcastic, but I think that if my reply helps just one person avoid prejudices, then it was worth my time to write it.
I must also say, that I'm not perfect and sometimes I find myself being prejudiced too. I try to stop myself when I catch it, but I make mistakes as well. I don't want anyone to feel that I'm trying to talk down to them. I don't want anyone to feel that I believe myself to be better than them.
I hope that better explains my post
---FourChannel---