They should because it's self-evident that I am a human being? To me, at least. I spend a lot of time in a male-dominant community (atheists/skeptics/rationalists cluster), and even more time in a female-dominated domain (nursing), and my conversations among females are no more dominated by emotion than those among males. We have conversations to share useful information and ask for practical advice, to tell morbid anecdotes that we all find hilarious, to share personal goals, to point out new discoveries in medicine that we think are fascinating and exciting, etc etc etc. It's so freaking obvious to me that this whole gender thing just Does. Not. Matter.

In my case at least, I think it's more precise to say that gender is screened off by context: a randomly chosen conversation between me and a male is more likely to be about physics and less likely to be about emotions than a randomly chosen conversation between me and a female, but once you specify whether or not they're a colleague of mine, whether or not we are on a walk together, etc., knowing their gender doesn't provide much more evidence either way; it's just that I have more male colleagues than female ones, take more walks with females than with males, etc.