Your first and second points reinforce each other. An "over representation of males" will tend to direct the conversation to "topics covered by ET which display a heavy over representation of males." In other words, guys tend to talk about guy stuff as guys talk about guy stuff. And the same goes the other way 'round: gals talk about gal stuff as gals talk about gal stuff.
But not necessarily relative to the composition of our (self-selected) audience.
Essentially, my second point contains the implicit assumption that "ET regular" is in every ordinary case an overwhelmingly more powerful predictor of behaviour than gender.
If this is true, which is of course open to some debate, a strong asymmetry in the response to and coverage of certain subjects would indicate not that they were "guy topics" or "gal topics" but some kind of divide in the community. Which may or may not be a bad thing - but should not be left entirely unexamined...
Or it may be taken to falsify the assumption. But, again, that's the comfortable result. So I'd prefer to be able to be reasonably confident that I'm not just picking it because it's the comfortable one.
- Jake If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.
... my second point contains the implicit assumption that "ET regular" is in every ordinary case an overwhelmingly more powerful predictor of behaviour than gender. If this is true, which is of course open to some debate, a strong asymmetry in the response to and coverage of certain subjects would indicate not that they were "guy topics" or "gal topics" but some kind of divide in the community.
If this is true, which is of course open to some debate, a strong asymmetry in the response to and coverage of certain subjects would indicate not that they were "guy topics" or "gal topics" but some kind of divide in the community.
This is, in a way, exactly where my thesis falls apart. ;-)
I agree there is, in fact, no such things as purely "guy topic" or "gal topic." If there was then no guy would ever be active in nurturing and no gal would be out swapping spark plugs in her truck. But there are strong tendencies for certain topics to divide along gender. Nobody, that I know of, is completely sure why that is. To some degree - how much? who knows - is cultural; to some degree - how much? who knows - is physical; to some degree - how much? who knows - is some combination of cultural and physical.
Be all that as it may, in our culture topics such as economics and politics, the major focus at ET, are assigned to the male gender and, generally, it's a statistically safe bet anyone discussing politics or economics on a blog is a man. If this site was focused on knitting it would be a statistically safe bet a poster would be a woman.
Be THAT as it may, the one substantive thing ET does offer a woman interested and knowledgeable in economics and politics is gender anonymity. Men really do, up close and in person, devalue women in all kinds of subtle and no so subtle ways. (The historical cringe inducing "find me a chick to do some typing" immediately leaps to mind.) Unless a poster "outs" herself we don't know what TEU345 looks like and so we - male and female alike - have to "deal with" what TEU345 (actually) says.
Which, I have observed, is a sometime-thing in F2F communication.
Thus & therefore, I disagree there is a "divide in the community" per se as regards to the topics discussed while hastening to add there is - to some degree - a divide in the way the topics are discussed and, perhaps, the way topics are valued. (?)
one of the things i like about the internet is that ideas travel unharnessed by gender and ego, or can do.
of this kind of cyber-castalia is a chimera, because we are affected subtly by enculturation and gender is a big part of that.
in this 'pure idea' realm it gets pretty colourless, and our human curiosity desires to flesh out the narrative of pure ideas with some human distortion, like with sound, digital being unearthly in some way.
ambiguous comment? yup.
i like it when the blog teeters on intellectual, gender-irrelevant highwires, and i like it when it falls off, how's that?
great discussion, in epic ET style. ~"When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate." Karl Jung~
