My priors before I started paying attention at all (i.e. before the first time it came up in a conversation I was part of, on the internet, that someone was uncomfortable / sad / whatever that they were being referred to as the wrong gender—which, for record, was a post-op man genetically female who still had a few culturally-programmed female-expected behaviors) were around about .4 female to .6 male for any random person I meet and discuss with on the Internet.
Even that .4 seems rather high compared to the base stats I’ve seen since then for some populations, but there’s apparently some factor which makes me more likely to engage and enjoy discussions and interactions over the web with women, for some reason I don’t yet understand.
However, since then, I’ve had to update downwards. Even with my abnormal encounter rates (e.g. meeting 30% women in communities that are 3% women overall), on average I still only expect and observe that I “befriend” (or otherwise engage and interact with more actively with) women only one in five times of such people, i.e. the other four are men. This if I only include so-called “normal” men and women, because I also end up meeting abnormally high numbers of transgenders, asexuals, queers, and other nonstandard genders.
On top of that, out of the women that I do tend to interact with (which are already at less than 0.2 expected rate), only one in two cases I’ll end up having to refer to them before their gender becomes “revealed” in some manner (sometimes because of an obvious nickname). Of the half where I do, nowadays I use gender-neutral format, but before I started doing so, only one in four (well, three out of thirteen to the best of my memory, in total) got slighted/offended/whatever that I used male pronouns.
Which basically ends up with there being an approximately 2% expected probability that for any person I start interacting with I might use a male pronoun for a woman that will be affected by it, unless there is a high amount of women who get hurt from wrong pronoun usage but never reveal this. This is including my current rate of female:male encounter ratio, which I’ve already confirmed is abnormal from other stats (e.g. I’ve eliminated cases like women just befriending more people than men or similar situations).
I would expect that most people have their expectations somewhere around this or even rarer, so I can’t fault them for using male pronouns on the Internet by default without first having to fault them for thousands of other, much worse things.
For bias evaluation purposes: I have been identified and referred to with female pronouns at least twice on the Internet, and wasn’t offended (in one case, I was actually flattered, for various contextual reasons). In the past week, excluding work colleagues and LessWrong, I’ve maintained more meaningful Internet-based interactions with three regular men, two women, and one genetically-male unclear-someone who hasn’t quite yet resolved his own personal gender-identity yet and would probably fall in some gray area between “queer” and “pre-op transgender”.
My priors before I started paying attention at all (i.e. before the first time it came up in a conversation I was part of, on the internet, that someone was uncomfortable / sad / whatever that they were being referred to as the wrong gender—which, for record, was a post-op man genetically female who still had a few culturally-programmed female-expected behaviors) were around about .4 female to .6 male for any random person I meet and discuss with on the Internet.
Even that .4 seems rather high compared to the base stats I’ve seen since then for some populations, but there’s apparently some factor which makes me more likely to engage and enjoy discussions and interactions over the web with women, for some reason I don’t yet understand.
However, since then, I’ve had to update downwards. Even with my abnormal encounter rates (e.g. meeting 30% women in communities that are 3% women overall), on average I still only expect and observe that I “befriend” (or otherwise engage and interact with more actively with) women only one in five times of such people, i.e. the other four are men. This if I only include so-called “normal” men and women, because I also end up meeting abnormally high numbers of transgenders, asexuals, queers, and other nonstandard genders.
On top of that, out of the women that I do tend to interact with (which are already at less than 0.2 expected rate), only one in two cases I’ll end up having to refer to them before their gender becomes “revealed” in some manner (sometimes because of an obvious nickname). Of the half where I do, nowadays I use gender-neutral format, but before I started doing so, only one in four (well, three out of thirteen to the best of my memory, in total) got slighted/offended/whatever that I used male pronouns.
Which basically ends up with there being an approximately 2% expected probability that for any person I start interacting with I might use a male pronoun for a woman that will be affected by it, unless there is a high amount of women who get hurt from wrong pronoun usage but never reveal this. This is including my current rate of female:male encounter ratio, which I’ve already confirmed is abnormal from other stats (e.g. I’ve eliminated cases like women just befriending more people than men or similar situations).
I would expect that most people have their expectations somewhere around this or even rarer, so I can’t fault them for using male pronouns on the Internet by default without first having to fault them for thousands of other, much worse things.
For bias evaluation purposes: I have been identified and referred to with female pronouns at least twice on the Internet, and wasn’t offended (in one case, I was actually flattered, for various contextual reasons). In the past week, excluding work colleagues and LessWrong, I’ve maintained more meaningful Internet-based interactions with three regular men, two women, and one genetically-male unclear-someone who hasn’t quite yet resolved his own personal gender-identity yet and would probably fall in some gray area between “queer” and “pre-op transgender”.