sannse wrote:
I haven't bothered to correct those on Wikipedia who have presumed I'm male - it hasn't bothered me and doesn't seem worth the typing. But since seeing you comment on this I've realised you are right - we have a tendency to presume anyone without an obviously female name is male. And I do it myself all the time. I can't think of a single contributor with a gender-neutral name that I picture as female (unless they have identified themselves as such).
Well, on this issue it's usually a reasonable assumption -- at least in most places where online discussion takes place, the participants are invariably 90-95% male (and sometimes it's more lopsided than that -- take a look at [[Slashdot]]'s demographics...). In fact, often you're better off presuming even (or perhaps especially!) people with obviously-female names are male. Wikipedia may be somewhat more diverse, though I doubt it'd be possible to get good statistics. But in any case once we "assume everyone is male" people start noticing a few times we're wrong about it, we start getting more wary about assuming in the future (or so's the hope anyway). It's in places that every time you assume someone's male it turns out they actually *are* male that it's hard to change to become less presumptuous. :-P
-Mark