On Fri, 09 June 2000, "Rachel Luxemburg" wrote:

I suspect that men who hold or have held jobs in overwhelmingly female fields have the best chance of grokking this issue. Or, of course, other minorities (you could count the number of black employees at my employer's HQ on one hand).

My primary customers used to be libraries and librarians. My boss was a women, the majority of my customers were women, the majority of the decision makers were women, the majority of my co-workers were women. Its true, catalogers think only another cataloger could possibly understand their lingo and didn't want to waste their time talking to a customer service rep who doesn't have a clue what a MARC tag is. 99% of the time, it didn't make any difference. Servers in resturants being the notable exception. When a group of women librarians and myself would have a business meal, inevitably the waiter or waitress would hand me the check. But I've been told I have the inter-personal skills of a rock, so I may have missed something. The nature of the digital world does tend to hide some factors. I've built up mental images of people I know electronically, and have been surprised when I first meet the person in person by just about every possible physical characteristic. One interesting psychological difference is women are generally (gross generalization) better at detecting men pretending to be women on-line, than men detecting either women pretending to be men or men pretending to be women on-line. Just in case any males are thinking of subscribing to the net-girls under false pretenses. On the other hand, this is NANOG. If someone posted "The Earth is round" I suspect we'd have 1 post saying the earth is a sphere 5 posts saying the earth is flat 9 posts correcting them, saying is egg-shaped 2 posts explaining how the shape varies depending on the dynamic properties of the core 1 post saying its bigger on the bottom than on the top 2 posts from Australia claiming the poster was engaging in hemispherism and the globe doesn't have a "bottom" or "top" 2 posts with JPG files from NASA showing the earth is round 3 posts complaining about the size of the JPG images 7 posts saying the images are NSA forgeries 2 posts saying its off-topic for this list 7 posts discussing the appropriate topics for the list 2 posts saying MAE-east could be hit be an asteroid 3 posts discussing off-planet backup facilities 9 posts discussing the RTT of martian packets 5 posts debating on the proper way to calculate the speed of light 3 posts on the SETI@Home project 5 posts on making SETI@Home run on linux machines 1 post asking how to configure a Cisco router to run SETI@Home