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mstevens comments on LW Women: LW Online - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hmm, so I'm thinking about smileys and exclamation points now. I don't think they just demonstrate friendliness - I think they also connote femininity. I used to use them all the time on IRC, until I realized that the only people who did so were female, or were guys who struck me as more feminine as a result. I didn't want to be conspicuously feminine on IRC, so I stopped using smileys/exclamation points there.
It never bothered me when other people didn't use smileys/exclamations. But when I stopped using them on IRC, everything I wrote sounded cold or rude. I felt like I should put the smileys in to assure people I was happy and having a good time (just as I always smile in person so that people will know I'm enjoying myself). But no one else was using them, and they didn't strike me as unfriendly, so I decided to stop using them.
Until I saw this comment, I had forgotten that I had adjusted myself in this way! In light of this, I may have to take back some of my earlier comments, as it really does seem like culturally enforced gender differences are getting in the way here, and that LW has little tolerance for people who sound feminine (perhaps because of an association between femininity and irrationality, which I'll admit to being guilty of myself).
Do other people associate smileys and exclamations with feminity, or is it just me?
(EDIT: Now I'm thinking that smileys vs. lack thereof might also be a formality thing. I also limit the amount of smileys/exclamations that I put in work emails, because they seem overly friendly/informal for a professional context. LW feels more like a professional environment than a social gathering to me, I think.)
Okay, after threatening, I had a go at hacking up a smiley gender detector for lesswrong irc.
Looking at the counts of smileys-per-message by nick, no obvious pattern.
Looking at averages:
male avg 0.015764359871 female avg 0.0194180023583
The dataset I'm using is so male dominated I don't think the results can be particularly meaningful.
Also, the fact that LW itself isn't smiley friendly. An interesting project would be to gather data from the real life facebook pages of both males and females on LW and see if a discrepancy shows up there. People would have to volunteer their facebooks for you to look at which might cause a bit of a selection effect. (The less trusting/interpersonal types might be less likely to both volunteer their fb, and to use smileys)
The reason I say this, is because I severely limit my smiley usage on LW.
One user who's part of the female dataset has already reported cutting out the smileys deliberately. As I say, I don't put much faith in the results.
I did consider scraping lesswrong.com for data, but a) I wasn't sure of the etiquette b) I don't have a list of female users (maybe I can get them from the survey?) c) it's a lot more coding.
How are you determining gender of users?
The number of female users is so small I just hardcoded known female nicks.
As I say, I don't think the results are particularly meaningful.