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From: eafournier@lion.uwaterloo.ca (Wade Richards)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,uw.general
Subject: Re: Recursion Summary
Message-ID: <1990Oct25.030752.6568@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Date: 25 Oct 90 03:07:52 GMT
References: <1990Oct23.211651.10227@contact.uucp>
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Owner of Many System Processes)
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In article <1990Oct23.211651.10227@contact.uucp> rrwood@contact.uucp (roy wood) writes:
>And as an interesting side note, I'd like to point out that my original
>message made no mention of the sex of the person I was trying to convince,
>yet *everyone* assumed that this person was male.  In fact, she is very
>much female.  I suppose this is an interesting demonstration of a strong
>bias or stereotyping among us.  Does anyone want to do a thesis on the
>subject?

Does this have to be a bias or a stereotype?  Why can't we just notice
that there are more males in the CS field than there are females, and
make the statistically most likely correct guess? 

It's far too awkword to use (s)he, and for some reason both genders seem
to object to the gender-neutral `it'. 

Sexual stereotyping seems to be such a popular catch-phrase these days
that everyone wants to hang that label on anything.  Personally, I think
that stereotyping is slightly less common than many people would claim. 

By the way, here are some more "sexual stereotypes" that fall into the
same catagory: when I refer to a nurse whose gender I don't know, I
assume female.  If I don't know the gender of a sumo-wrestler, I assume
male. 

And no, I don't have any stastical data to back up my assumption that
there are many more males working in CS than females, just my own
perception and informal head-counts. 


	--- Wade