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CannibalSmith comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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Let me be the first to say: welcome to Less Wrong! Please explore the site and stay with us - we need more girls.
I'd quite strongly suggest deleting everything after the hyphen, there.
No.
Verbal symbols are slippery things sometimes.
Explain.
No, at least not right now.
When, if I may be so bold? (Bear in mind that it is not necessary to explain your remark in full generality - just in sufficient detail to justify its presence as a response to CannibalSmith in this instance.)
Fair enough!
Even the bit before the hyphen sounds a little on the needy side.
And while we're at it, it should really be an em dash, not a hyphen.
En dash - it's surrounded by spaces. And I don't think the reddit engine tells you how to code it. A hyphen is the accepted substitute (for the en dash - two hyphens for an em dash).
An en dash is defined by its width, not the spacing around it. In fact, spacing around an em dash is permitted in some style guides. On the internet, though, the hyphen has generally taken over from the em dash (an en dash should not be used in that context).
Now, two hyphens—that's a recipe for disaster if I've ever heard one.
Hey, I like double-hyphens as em-dash substitutes!
...but yeah, you're right otherwise.
Why?
Because advertising your lack of girls is not viewed by the average woman as a hopeful sign. (Heck, I'd think twice about any online site that advertised itself with "we need more boys".)
Also, the above point should be sufficiently obvious that a potential female reader would look at that and justifiably think "This person is thinking about what they want and not thinking about how I might react" which isn't much of a hopeful sign either.
I'm probably non-average, but I'm ambivalent about hearing "we need more girls" from any community that's generally interesting. The first question that I think of is "why don't they have any?", but as long as it's not obvious to me why there are not presently enough girls had by a website and it's easy to leave if I find a compelling reason later, my obliging nature would be likely to take over. Also, saying "we need more girls" does advertise the lack of girls - but it also advertises the recognition that maybe that's not a splendid thing. Not saying it at all might signify some kind of attempt at gender-blindness, but it could also signify complacency about the ungirly ratio extant.
I hear "we need more girls" from my female classmates about our philosophy department.
We also hear this kind of thing online, in the atheism community.
To sum up the convo, then, it seems like:
the "too many dicks on the dance floor" attitude isn't particularly attractive, but
the honest admission that there aren't many female regulars, and that we'd like the input of women on the issues which we care about, is perfectly valid.
The rest of it is our differing levels of charity in interpreting CannibalSmith's remarks.
As with so many other remarks, this carries a different freight of meaning when spoken by a woman to a woman.
I think I don't hear it from my male classmates because they aren't alert to this need. I would be pleased to hear one of them acknowledge it. This may have something to do with the fact that I'd trust most of them to be motivated by something other than a desire for eye candy or dating opportunities, though, if they did express this concern.
"I think I don't hear it from my male classmates because they aren't alert to this need. I would be pleased to hear one of them acknowledge it."
Why do you feel there is a need for more female philosophy students in your department?
I think a more balanced ratio would help the professors learn to be sensitive to the different typical needs of female students (e.g. decrease reliance on the "football coach" approach). Indirectly, more female students means more female Ph.Ds means more female professors means more female philosophy role models means more female students, until ideally contemporary philosophy isn't so terribly skewed. More female students would also increase the chance that there would be more female philosophers outside the typical "soft options" (history and ethics and feminist philosophy), which would improve the reception I and other female philosophers would get when proposing ideas on non-soft topics like metaphysics because we'd no longer look atypical for the sort of person who has good ideas on metaphysics.
That's what we hoped for in the physical/biological sciences. Then we discovered we had a glass ceiling problem. We have more than enough female grads now, more than half in some programs, but not enough become PhD students. Last I heard, people who were looking into solving this problem had come to a conclusion that it wouldn't just resolve itself with time and needed active intervention, in part by deliberately creating female role models. (They're trying but so far no very notable successes on the statistical level.)
This is true for my university (Hebrew U of Jerusalem) and other Israeli universities, and from what I'd heard in many other parts of the Western world as well. Is your philosophy dept. different?
What did you think when you first saw my "we need more girls" remark?
I found it flattering.
Inapt.
That's five divs, which means it is a reply to, let's see...