On 30 March 2013 22:39, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:

>Thank you for sharing this Jane. It's amazing that it's still such an issue but yeah, a great example of how deeply >rooted our presumptions are.

This actually happened to me, in a way, with one now long-departed Wikipedia editor. Despite a female-suffixed username*, I assumed this editor was a male because she was a flagrant asshole in some AfDs in a way that (in my experience) only men ever are. I was actually stunned to find out she was indeed a she.

Daniel Case

*As most of us know, username-based gender assumptions cut both ways. Users Hersfold and Nancy (see the explanation on his userpage) are both men, yet regularly deal with new editors assuming based on their names that they’re female. And I know they’re not the only ones.

Hersfold and Nancy aren't the only ones. I've almost come to assume that if a username "sounds" feminine, it's probably attached to a man. Almost every editor I know whose username ends in an "a" is male. And many female editors have "male" sounding usernames.

If Wikipedia has taught me one thing, it is never to assume anything about the identity of the person on the other side of a username: not age, not gender, not orientation, not geographical location, or a million other things that we tend to use to categorize people.

Risker/Anne