Sexism in the Ruby community: how does the Python community manage it?

[Danyelle Davis]

I am a woman and all I can say to these things is.. Bringing light to these
things do nothing but give attention to the attention seeking.. yea the
names are dumb.  But does it ever stop me. No.  Mainly because ignore the
college/boyish mentality that is associated with names like that.


On Thu, Oct 17, 2013 at 9:52 AM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:

> In article <2013101623133337485-owenjacobson at grimoireca>,
>  Owen Jacobson <owen.jacobson at grimoire.ca> wrote:
>
> > * SexMachine (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/SexMachine/0.1.1 - an
> > attempt to detect the gender of names, which… well, ask the nearest boy
> > named Sue - or girl named Leslie)
>
> I'm not sure what you're objecting to here.  Is it the name, or the
> functionality?
>
> As for the name, I guess different people have different reactions, but
> I (as a male) find this only mildly offensive.  I can see why some
> people might have a stronger reaction to it.  Perhaps not the best name
> one might have come up with, but certainly not anywhere near the list
> you cited.  I would not have picked the name myself, but I also would
> not want to see us go so far as to forbid something with that name from
> being listed on pypi.
>
> As for the function, guessing gender from names is important in the
> advertising world.  Everybody knows that some names are ambiguous.  And
> that sometimes names that you would think of as unambiguously associated
> with a particular gender are used by the other.  And a zillion other
> ways the guess can be wrong.
>
> Still, it's worth real money in on-line commerce and advertising to know
> (even with a certain degree of uncertainty) somebody's gender.  So it's
> not surprising people are writing tools to guess that from names.  Nor
> do I think it's inappropriate.
>
> Full disclosure: I work for a company which makes money selling on-line
> advertising.  If we can provide accurate gender information to our
> advertisers, we can charge them more per impression.
>
> --
> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20131017/008dd351/attachment.html>