Re: gender & gentleness

Like antirice, I'd like to see some data. It sounds plausible, but there's nothing like evidence to support your claim. You clearly did not do your homework.

So, you should collect a sampling of about 1000 randomly-chosen posts and have a look at the following factors:

Female/male ratio of the monks.
Do the posters come from cultures where being "nice" to girls is the norm? Does the norm apply universally, or just to heterosexual males?
Level of RTFM (Everyone gets told to RTFM at times, especially beginners). You will have to come up with a scheme of grading the level of response and correlate that to (perceived) biological gender.
That information will have to be correlated to the (perceived) biological gender of the responses' writers (i.e. the "community").
Of course, you will also have to come up with a means of objectively identifying the perceived bioloical gender of everyone posting. (Obviously, you could cut to the chase and ask everyone.)

If given more time, I could probably come up with a few other criteria that would make this question answerable.

--
Allolex

Comment on Re: gender & gentleness

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Re: Re: gender & gentleness by Melly (Chaplain) on Oct 10, 2003 at 12:30 UTC
... and don't forget that you have to look at the phrasing of the original post - e.g. "I'm probably being stupid, but what's the difference between $foo and @foo?" is probably going to get a more sympathetic response than "$foo and @foo are the same thing, so why is my script not working? Stupid Perl..." Maybe women are just politer than men? Tom Melly, tom@tomandlu.co.uk	[reply]
Re: Re: Re: gender & gentleness by allolex (Curate) on Oct 10, 2003 at 17:50 UTC
That's a valid point. Women are in fact generally more polite than men. Sociolinguists see a direct relationship between politeness and indirectness. Men are often frustrated by women's indirectness, like when a woman says "My, it is chilly in here" to say "Please close the window", but men still appreciate it when they understand it. ;) -- Allolex Perl and Linguistics http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/perl/linguistics.html http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3394 http://www.wall.org/~larry/keynote/keynote.html	[reply]