Words known better by males than females, and vice versa | Hacker News Reader

Words known better by males than females, and vice versa

observablehq.com

673 pointsyurivish650 comments

Wow I thought this was going to be a subtle effect but I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male). What’s even the context of those top words? The male ones are tech/games/science but the female? I think I half recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.

> What’s even the context of those top words?

Without trying to google any of them, I think they're colors - I think chambray is a color, but I don't know what color it is.

It’s a type of fabric, not colour.

Chambray is stuff you make a work or gardening shirt out of. Men used to all wear chambray work shirts.

Seems a bunch are around fabric/garments, I have a minor sewing hobby so I recognized some of them (male)

Yeah, it's very nearly all fabric or textile-related from what I can tell. Bet you could make the same list by picking any two sex-skewed hobbies and charting words that see little use outside those interests.

A bunch but not all, Picking out a few I recognized (though I had to double check freesia).

A doula is basically a birthing coach often used for at home pregnancies, a pessary is a vaginal medical device, kohl is eye makeup, verbena is an herb, freesia is a flower, chigon is a type of hair bun.

Midwife

Doulas may or may not have midwife training, they aren't the same thing

https://thewell.northwell.edu/pregnancy/doula-vs-midwife

Thank you, that’s an excellent article!

I recognized it because I once destroyed a couch fabric in a rented apartment and had to choose a replacement. It’s as bad as choosing js framework, but you’re not a tech guy on top of that.

You probably already know this, but that makes you a seamster. I both sew and practice a particular LISP dialect, making me a seamster schemester (in the words of GJS).

That's awesome!

Or when you return a suit for some alterations, that would be a tailor recursion.

I know that Jaquard is a kind of loom, but I only know that because of an interest in early industrial manufacturing tech

Jacquard is actually an interesting one to me, because it overlaps the two major subject areas (fashion/textiles and science/tech). It's also one I (male) knew, while I didn't know most of the "more female" words.

The Jacquard loom was programmable with punch cards, and is a very important early predecessor of computers (especially Babbage's analytical engine). IIRC, there's one (or a replica) in the Computer History Museum.

Jacquard also refers to the kind of fabric the loom could produce.

Learned about that in James Burkes Connections! Amazing series if you haven’t seen it.

Everything by James Burke is amazing. He's written a lot of other books in the Connections style

Yeah, I (male) recognized jacquard, but only in the context of the Jacquard loom and superficial awareness that they're programmable textile making machines.

My guess is that most men would know it as a loom and most women would know it as a type of fabric. I wonder if jacquard fabric is still produced on anything resembling a jacquard loom.

Jacquard looms are still in use and the principle is the same, they’re just constructed with modern materials and the patterns are CNC driven instead of punched cards :)

I thought I recognized Jacquard as in the similarity measure, but it turns out that one is actually spelled Jaccard. Thereby arguably furthering the initial point.

Yves Delorme make some lovely Jacquard bath sheets.

If you don't blanche at spending $100+ on a single towel. ;)

I knew Jacquard because of Google's textiles/tech project https://atap.google.com/jacquard/

The computer history museum had a full sized Babbage difference engine, not an analytical engine. It was on loan and the owner took it back to put in his living room or something.

I learned that one from Boards of Canada

https://bocpages.org/wiki/Jacquard_Causeway

https://vimeo.com/69572175

If i remember correctly, the cards used in Jacquard looms were then used for voting tabulation in the 1920s, by a small company called IBM. When computers came around in the early 40s, they were available as a source of input. This is where I first heard of jacquard looms anyway.

It was not, sadly, Jacquard who invented the loom that bears his name; Jacquard found one after the inventor died, made some improvements, and a lot of fabric.

The true inventor's name, Jacques de Vaucanson, is rarely mentioned. He also invented rubber tubing, and the chain drive, and the essential precision machine tools still used in every machine shop, and lately in CNC machines. Important stuff. He invented the rubber tube to use in a mechanical duck that would eat, drink, and crap. His inventions form the core of the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Museum of Arts and Trades, in Paris, not to be missed.

No one cares but I went 12/20 on the female words. Most of the ones I knew are fashion-related or flowers. The ones I didn't know (and looked up) are female reproduction-related.

I think males and females reproduce the same way.

Men don't generally have a doula guiding them through giving birth.

Which has nothing to do with his point.

I don't think they do. The second step for a man to reproduce, after going through a male puberty, is to find a woman. The process is different for women, and may never even directly involve a man.

Males would struggle to make proper use of a pessary.

Is this really the state of sex ed?

Not really... Not when they are the subject of the sentence instead of the direct object.

They're mostly about style in some manner. A chignon is a hairstyle, a bandeau is a garment, kohl is a type of facial makeup (with its own fascinating history). Jaquard, chambray, chenille, sateen, and damask are all words that apply to fabrics in some fashion. An espadrille is a particular style of shoe.

Verbena is a plant. A pessary is a medical device. A doula is a supportive person through a medical experience, often childbirth in an American context.

A pessary is a medical device inserted into the vagina, for further context.

I knew that one. Thanks to sex ed.

Monty Python was my introduction[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzVHjg3AqIQ

The data can be downloaded from https://osf.io/nbu9e/ . I tracked it down because I was wondering:

- pessary was known by 53% of females, 19% of males

- suppository was known by 88% of females, 80% of males

Suppository is one of those words that I would assume 99.9% of the population knows because of it being common over the counter, and in sitcoms and media. I'm assuming they're including children under 12 in the data? That would explain the low percentages.

That checks out. I'd say at least 80% of my encounters with the word have been jokes in media, or jokes between people (probably inspired by or ripped off from media). Most young kids wouldn't know it, though.

More people are functionally illiterate than you might expect if you're in a high IQ bubble like the tech industry. In 2017, 19% of American adults scored level 1 or below on the PIAAC literacy test: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69

Here's a sample reading test: https://www.oecd.org/skills/piaac/Literacy%20Sample%20Items.... It's a drawing of an ear, and the options are "ear", "egg", "lip" and "jar". You have to pick the correct word.

Wonder how much of this is ESL

If the US has so many non-English speakers that it materially affects national literacy statistics, one might wonder how we ended up with an immigration policy that produces a permanent underclass of people who are locked out of meaningful jobs and are entirely outside the protection of the law, due to being in the country illegally.

You don't have to be in the country illegally to not speak English (well). ~14% of the country is foreign-born, of whom about 3/4 are here legally: https://www.ilctr.org/quick-us-immigration-statistics/

Most immigrants are required to have basic English literacy for citizenship, per:

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-12-part-e-chapter...

You don't need to be a citizen to be a legal immigrant however.

I had no idea what a suppository is, but I do recognise pessary. But that's probably because suppository is completely different in Dutch, which is not the case for pessary.

What is the population (responders) sample size? Percentages don't mean much without this.

About 400 for each word. So any individual word doesn't mean much, I agree - I think they're more interested in the general trends.

388

I knew this because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Package...

If it's the same as the Dutch word "pessarium", I think it's a form of birth control. Got mentioned in sex-ed in school, though obviously not something I (as a man) ever had to use. I guess it makes sense for women to be more familiar with a device that only women ever use.

> Verbena is a plant

Hey, I knew that one! And sateen. But those were the only two. I didn't expect the divide to be so stark.

In hindsight, I suppose it's reasonable that terms from the largest, most gender-unbalanced niches should have considerable predictive power, but I didn't expect it to be quite so effective going in.

I only knew this one. I have a lemon verbena. It makes great infusions. I highly recommend it if you live in a warmish climate. They grow very fast.

I wonder if it’s the plant kingsfoil is based on in LOTR.

I recognised Verbena as a plant from The Witcher. So it counts as gaming-related for me.

Freesia is a plant too (my grandmother's favourite). I knew most of the fabric ones (ruche, tulle, chenille, etc) but that's my wife's hobby. I don't know if that counts as trade-specific jargon or not (I guess not if the majority of women know them, and not just dressmakers). People in our industry should definitely know jacquard, though.

I think the bigger surprise for me is now that the most gender imbalanced words are highly imbalanced, but that more than half of the male ones seem so common place and hardly obscure to me. I imagine women would react the same way to most of the female words.

I think most dads would know what a doula is

Not in the US, I bet. The only reason I know is that I had a male co-worker whose wife was one.

US Dad of 2. We had a doula for our first child, she was hugely helpful, even in a hospital birth. Highly recommend!

Doulas are yuppie stuff in the US, mostly. Also connected with home births to a large degree, rates of interest in which I'd expect are also connected with income, to a point. I'd definitely bet most US fathers wouldn't be able to tell you what it means, though it's possible that a majority of fathers on this site know the term (I did—but then, of course I do).

I'd be interested to see how knowledge of a lot of these words breaks down by income. (I too know what a doula is; I'm not sure if I knew this before my partner was pregnant. We did not use a doula, but we're of the class of people who at least think about it.)

Oh man, this exact thing but for income brackets would be fascinating.

New father of a 7 month old here (at the tender age of 49 no less).

We used a doula, but only as a support person (I believe in medical advances, hah) and she was fantastic for that role.

I am 38 and so much more tired from doing this than I would have if I were ten years younger. Not sure how I could do it if I were ten years older.

I'm in the UK and I'd associate doulas with hippies more than yuppies, might just be me though.

There was a doula on a 2004 episode of "Frasier" [1] which is probably where I learned the word.

[1] http://www.kacl780.net/frasier/transcripts/season_11/episode...

>> I think most dads would know what a doula is

> Not in the US, I bet. The only reason I know is that I had a male co-worker whose wife was one.

Yeah, I also feel the term and role could be very subculture-specific, and mainly limited to urban, very-liberal women interested in "wellness."

I've seen the term given brief treatment in some new parent books, but I would not have registered it if I hadn't already had some familiarity.

On the one hand, it's funny that you put "wellness" in scare quotes, but on the other hand my wife is into "wellness" and I absolutely get it.

This one wouldn't.

I'm a dad, and I'm familiar will all the words except pepium, ruche, doula, and shemale. I can guess that last one, but I've never heard it before.

BTW, my wife was familiar with all the words except checksum. Now she’s 100%.

I only ever saw the word Kohl(cabbage) when I played Stardew Valley in German. Never seen or heard any of the other female-dominant words in my life

That's a different Kohl. The english word Kohl means a type of african/middle eastern make-up (Kajal in german).

It might also be a interpreted as a reference to a department store chain that mostly sells clothing - Kohl's.

The eye makeup 'kohl' is in no way related to the German word for cabbage. Apparently it's an Arabic word (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kohl). Funnily enough, Kohle (with a schwa at the end) in German means coal (as a mass noun) which is of course black, like the eye makeup.

I always assumed kohl was somehow related to coal. Are you saying it's not?

I am a bit surprised that sateen is on that list since it is one of the most/more common fabric used for bedding.

Damask is a bit more funny word in that video games tend to commonly use it for items, given that it was popular during the middle ages. Never seen it in clothing stores.

There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd. There is one about the Jacquard machine?

Chambray was an popular fabric in the 19th century, but I don't remember seeing it in clothes stores.

Chenille seems to be a fabric used in yarns.

Sateen probably is a quite relevant example - I, as a male, have absolutely no idea what fabric is used for the bedding I sleep in or buy, it might as well be sateen but even when looking for bedding I would not care to read the part of the description where it could say 'sateen'; perhaps I might touch it while browsing in a store and use the sense as a criteria for choosing between, but it's not relevant enough to read and use the fabric name at the time, much less remember it. I know that there exist fancy beddings made of silk, but that's literally as far as my interest in bedding fabric has ever gone.

> There isn't a wikipedia article about jacquard as a fabric, which is a bit odd.

You got me curious, here are the lengths of the Wikipedia articles for the top three words:

Women know better

  - peplum: 886 words (disambiguation is the default)

  - boucle: 187 words

  - rouche: 196 words (disambiguation is the default and leads you to "Gather (knitting)")

Men know better

  - shemale: 1257 words

  - howitzer: 2211 words

  - parsec: 2505 words

Is this the reflection of some sort of gender bias in Wikipedia contributors and editors?

Wikipedia's own article on it states:

> In a 2018 survey covering 12 language versions of Wikipedia and some other Wikimedia Foundation projects, 90% of contributors reported their gender as male, 8.8% as female, and 1% as other.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

Curiously, peplum, boucle, and rouche were exactly the ones I didn't recognize. (Well, and whipstitch.)

ah, Rouché's theorem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rouch%C3%A9%27s_theorem

If you look up "chambray shirt" they'll likely be familiar to you

It’s funny because a lot of these are near everyday use French words:

- boucle: loop

- ruche: beehive

- chignon: hair bun?

- chenille: caterpillar

- bandeau: headband

- voile: veil

…

France has most (or a significant percentage) of the leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes sense.

> France has most (or a significant percentage) of the leading fashion houses and cosmetic brands. So it makes sense.

Also, I think French words (in general) have associations of "high class" and "fashionable" in the American context, so calling something by a French word is an easy way for a marketer to fancy something up (for certain classes of something).

French association with "high class" goes a long ways back, including to when Brittania was under Norman rule in the early 1000s.

Much of the loan words from Old French are considered classier compared to equivalent words from Old english

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_with_dua...

Exactly. This is most likely the cause.

There are no English words of non-French origin for many of these; it's not a marketing tactic: it's just the only way to denote e.g. boucle fabric or chenille yarn.

I attempted to learn French at one point and one thing I realized is that fancy words in English are frequently their direct translation in French. I assume this comes from royalty generally speaking both English and French. If there's a French user here, do you know if the reverse happened too?

Arguably goes back to the Norman conquest. You muck about in the fields with the Germanic swine but eat the French-derived pork. You raise cows but eat beef. Likewise mutton.

Military words also tend to come from French, which is how they got to be eating those fine foods.

But remember, the French have no word for entrepreneur :) [1]

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisoncoleman/2014/02/14/entrep...

Damn, that's a stupid article - another one - from Forbes. Entrepreneur is a French word, and entreprise is company in French. Jean-Baptiste Say coined the word 250 years ago. https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/origin-of-entrep...

For context: She's starting off the article with that obviously false malapropism sometimes attributed to George W. Bush as a springboard to talk about entrepreneurship in France, and it's clear that she is using it as a joke.

Indeed. It's tongue-in-cheek. As an aside, I heard a rumour it was Regan, not Bush who first uttered it. As a second side, I'm not sure it's technically a malapropism.

Also other words relating to those in charge, like "government", "minister" and "crown".

Verbena is a plant... commonly used as a fragrance for lotions and creams.

And here I was thinking I knew one of the "female" words because I recognized verbena. Verbena also means a party in Spanish, so I just assumed it was taken with that meaning in (American) English.

same

Same here, but I’m also surprised only around 30% of women know the word “yakuza”. Although I’m sure those same women would be shocked by my not knowing what a chignon is.

I was shocked at how low on the list "katana" was. It's so prevalent in pop culture, from Kill Bill to The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Leonardo uses ninjatos as of the last time I paid attention to the franchise. Katanas are much longer.

Whatever they look like, they're usually described by TMNT media as katanas. Quite possibly incorrectly, for all I know.

They wrote and spoke of them as katanas, yes. But you're also talking about a series who treated the Sai as a sharp weapon (which is round and a striking and blocking weapon)... though, I don't think they did this in the comic. It's been a while).

I bet if you charted hours spent with media in which the word "katana" occurs, you'd see a male/female ratio very similar to the "knows what 'katana' means" ratio in TFA.

I don't know if this would affect the observed/reported differences between sexes, but there are also different levels of knowing.

I would have known that neodymium is some kind of a substance, but I wouldn't have known or remembered that it was an element without checking. I'd probably answer I knew the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it physically is, I'd struggle. I might not remember what distinguishes howitzers from other artillery pieces. Out of these, I'd probably report not knowing neodymium, knowing howitzer, and be a bit torn on degaussing.

Someone might know that a katana is a weapon, or "some kind of a ninja thing", or maybe even a sword, but might not feel comfortable enough about the details to report knowing it. Also, it might be more well-known among younger people who know the pop culture than people who don't.

But then, I guess it might also be that people just have rather different areas of familiarity, as the article indicates, and a significant part of the English speaking population might be as clueless about katanas as I am about tulles, or whatever the plural for that is. I only knew one or two of the words from the upper half. I'm not a native English speaker, though, which perhaps not only limits my vocabulary compared to native speakers but might also tilt things even further towards the science/tech words.

"Unusually strong neodymium magnets" were a popular young-adult toy in the late 2000s to early 2010s. I had them both in flat discs and little balls.

Now that I have a baby crawling around I pray that I haven't misplaced any in some crevice of the house...

They were also a part of rotating rust drives, which made it very fun to find old ones and pick them apart.

Wait. What will they do to babies?!

If someone swallows more than one, they can pinch together different parts of the intestine or bowl and cause a perforation, which is a serious medical emergency that if untreated will lead to death.

It's dangerous for anyone, but babies and toddlers are most likely to actually swallow them.

It's the only example I know of where swallowing one thing is totally harmless, but swallowing a second one is really seriously dangerous.

> I'd probably answer I knew the word "degauss" but if I had to explain what it physically is, I'd struggle.

It's a button on old monitors.

That's all I know about it. It sounds like it undoes something magnetic-field related, but I have no clue what.

That's pretty much what I'd know about it, too. IIRC its supposed purpose was to fix distortion on CRT displays caused by, uhm, probably something magnetically related. Exactly the level of "knowing" where I'd feel ambivalent.

My non-binary friend knew roughly half of both sides.

(No joke)

They are AFAB, interested in japanese culture and STEM, but also sew rather much.

In case anyone wondered, here "AFAB" means "assigned female at birth" [1] and as far as I can understand simply means that the person was determined to be female at some point, by visual inspection basically.

[1] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sexopedia/a38294924/afab-amab/

It's really to do with gender roles though. Nurse sees a penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate - child ends up being told by teachers they're not allowed to cry because they're a boy.

Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary. Maybe not enough to feel it's worth declaring, but I've never met anyone who really loves everything about their gender role.

Same for age role, socioeconomic role, or racial role. I wonder why we only talk about gender roles.

Elaborate?

Gender roles certainly exist. Why wouldn't age roles, socioeconomic roles, or racial roles exist as well?

We have other terms and other words we use when talking about some of those things.

Who said they didn't?

99.5% penis comes with testosterone and resulting male anatomical characteristics. The exception proves the rule.

The comment was about cultural gender roles, not anatomy.

They're the same almost 100% of the time.

Even if you make the distinction, "female" describes sex, not gender. So the acronym "AFAB" is a bit internally contradictory if you remember that it was created in order to underline the distinction. Then again, these days more often I see people denying the existence of sex, and replacing it with gender altogether, so maybe it's not that surprising after all.

> Even if you make the distinction, "female" describes sex, not gender

Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.

Wikipedia[1]:

> Female (symbol: ) is the sex of an organism that produces the large non-motile ova (egg cells), the type of gamete (sex cell) that fuses with the male gamete during sexual reproduction.

[1]: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female>

> Sex is a multidimensional spectrum. "Sex" categories are, in fact, genders--social constructs.

Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum. There are two sexes: male and female, this is statistically observable as a binary. Deviations from this binary are not "third" or "fourth" sexes. It's not a social phenomenon.

The reason why people seem incapable of saying this today, is for political and legal aims (if you can't change legislation that refers to "sex", change what the word means), or a misguided attempt to be progressive.

> Sex is not a multidimensional spectrum.

Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

> There are two sexes: male and female,

Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.

> Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution, unless you take something like phenotypical height. In the aggregrate, they also form "sex" which is binary. Differences in sexual traits do not create "third, or fourth" sexes.

> Those binary sex categories are a social construct layered on top of the multidimensional physical reality.

This is an ideological perspective, which is pushed forwards by those who want to change the law around sex, by redefining what sex means.

For example, under the Equality Act 2010 (UK), hospital wards are allowed to keep sex segregated for reasons of privacy and dignity, which to some is unacceptable.

Sex is an observation of a physical reality, not a "social construct". It would have been unremarkable to say this even 5 years ago. The physical reality around sex has not changed, rather the ideology around it has, which is why I'm going to leave this discussion there, as there's no reasoning with that.

> > Sex consists of multiple different traits which have a bimodal, not binary, distribution.

> Sex traits in most cases follow a binary distribution

Which is exactly saying they, in the whole, actually follow a bimodal, rather than binary, distribution.

Sex is a bimodal distribution that is so _extremely_ polar that calling it binary would be more accurate and helpful than bimodal. Calling sex bimodal is in the large misleading, even if correct in the narrow definitional sense.

That multidimensional physical reality is, in turn, layered on top of the binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.

The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.

You appear to reject the existence of sexual genotype. On what basis?

(Edit: s/haploid/diploid/)

The determination of sex in a biological context is based on chromosomes, hormone levels, and secondary sex characteristics.

For a 101 understanding of biology, by far the most common chromosome possibilities are XX and XY, but XXY is possible, as are mutations in one chromosome that combine pieces of X and Y such that a mix of secondary sex characteristics appear. It's also possible for someone with XX chromosomes to have abnormally high levels of testosterone, or someone with XY chromosomes to have abnormally low levels of testosterone and high levels of estrogen, with results such that a visual inspection would not be able to accurately guess the underlying chromosomes.

Hence, bimodal, not binary.

I agree with you regarding the chromosome possibilities. However, aside from rare mutations and developmental anomalies, mammals are either XX or XY. The exceptions prove the rule, and one doesn’t discard all that evidence just to accommodate minor anomalies which have adequate explanations. If you did, science would make no progress.

Regarding your first paragraph, replace “biological” with “sociological”. Then, that is what has been done traditionally, in the absence of the recent ability to determine sexual genotype by DNA analysis.

The Wikipedia pages on Sex[0] and Phenotypic trait[1] are actually pretty neutral.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotypic_trait

Bimodal still implies that most things fall into one of two categories. Binary implies that they all do. You've basically admitted that the distinction is not binary.

Further, we still don't do DNA analysis on the vast majority of people to determine whether they are biologically male or female, certainly not before making a determination for a birth certificate. Even if we did, there's not one true X chromosome and one true Y chromosome that all XY people have, which a strictly binary interpretation would imply. Genetic crossovers between the two are a natural part of reproduction.

The biology of this is really fascinating, and I think it's both disingenuous and incurious to attempt to reduce all of this to a strictly binary model.

Male and female genotypes don't form a distribution, they are one or the other, modulo very rare transcription errors or mutations (which generally don't survive the first few cell divisions following fertilization).

So, talking about "bimodal" as if they were a combination of two normal distributions is not reflective of objective reality, since neither one is stochastic. There is no normal distribution of male genotype-ness, and no super male chromosome.

All X chromosomes differ from all other X chromosomes, but there are no half-X, half-Y chromosomes.

Because of this, in virtually all cases sex at birth is obvious to a medical practitioner. In questionable cases exhibiting abnormal genitalia we can, these days, do a quick DNA test to decide the matter. Wishful thinking is unnecessary.

And, yes, biology is absolutely fascinating.

> binary reality that in adult, diploid mammals, the key chromosome pair is either XX or XY, and that every cell (except the somatic line) in that individual will have the same pair.

Unless one adopts a different definition of “individual” than the one usually applied to humans, this is wrong (germline chimerism is a thing), and right or wrong it's a weirdly narrow claims, as most cells are in the somatic line, anyway.

> The issue is that you are saying that the sexual phenotype is primary, while I claim, on the basis of biology, that the sexual genotype is primary.

Biology and medicine refer to people with phenotypical traits more associated with maleness despite XX chromosomes as “biologically male” and “XX male” (and those with traits associated more with femaleness despite XY chromosomes as ”biologically female” and “XY female”), and similarly (with variations by karyotype) based on phenotype for individuals with non-(46,XX or 46,XY) karyotypes, so even in the sense of the way biology and medicine bucket people into a forced binary, you are wrong.

And karyotype (which is what you seem to mean when you say “genotype”) still isn't binary even if you view it as “primary”, and actual genotype is even less so.

How is being able to be a specific party in the reproduction process a social construct? Is the categorization of penguins into egg-layers and egg-fertilizers also a social construct?

"AFAB" is an appropriation from literature describing DSDs, where sex was to some extent "assigned" in the case of ambiguity.

Applying it to the population at large is absurd, but has become popular within some social circles.

> Nurse sees a penis on the baby - writes M on the birth certificate

Sex is determined at conception and parents today often know what it is before birth.

> Non binary people think those gender roles don't make sense for themselves, and in that respect, I think almost everyone is at least a little non binary.

You only say that because of rigid thinking about what boys and girls are.

When someone says to a boy "stop crying like a girl" he's displaying a rigid definition of what a boy is. Instead of saying that some boys can be very sentimental too, you're saying he's non-base-2. That's no different from the person saying boys shouldn't cry.

>Sex is determined at conception

That's only a part of it. Embryonic development plays a part too.

>and parents today often know what it is before birth.

They don't know for sure. Not even the doctors can determine it 100%. The estimation is done by looking for a penis with ultrasound. Sometimes the estimation isn't correct and the opposite gender is assigned after.

In practice, it’s pretty much synonymous with “biologically female”.

Same with my spouse, non-binary, regular anime watcher / video game player, so "katana" they knew, but not "strafe". (I should get them into TF2...)

Same here. Even for the few male words I didn't know exactly what they meant, I had a vague ideas about them, while the female ones are complete gibberish to me.

A sort of early nearly-robot; it's where punched cards were first used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquard_machine

I think this is thoroughly expected.

Imagine you have a set of legal words (legalese) and then you have a set of scientific words or statistical words (all cants) and you show the sets to those not associated with those sets… we’d see similar results.

It’s neat to find these oddities but that’s all it is, linguistically.

I only know because we attempted a home birth and my wife trained to become one, but a doula is an assistant to a midwife. It would make sense most men would have no idea what this is but a lot of women have probably watched YouTube videos thinking about how they want to give birth, so doula would be a well defined word for them.

Yeah, this was way more accurate for me than I expected.

I figured that I'd be old/wise/literate enough to know many of the "female" words. Nope

I feel like this is cheating a bit. Like peplum.... I had no mental construct of peplum as a thing. So it's not like I just don't know the word. I didn't know that there was even a thing that a word could exist for. The underlying mental conception is the thing that's actually missing.

It largely follows gender stereotypical interest lines. In this one, my wife describes the list as "fashion related stuff". Here's another older list from a different study[0]

Higher recognition rates by males:

- codec (88, 48)

- solenoid (87, 54)

- golem (89, 56)

- mach (93, 63)

- humvee (88, 58)

- claymore (87, 589

- scimitar (86, 58)

- kevlar (93, 65)

- paladin (93, 66)

- bolshevism (85, 60)

- biped (86, 61)

- dreadnought (90, 66)

Higher recognition rates by females:

- taffeta (48, 87)

- tresses (61, 93)

- bottlebrush (58, 89)

- flouncy (55, 86)

- mascarpone (60, 90)

- decoupage (56, 86)

- progesterone (63, 92)

- wisteria (61, 89)

- taupe (66, 93)

- flouncing (67, 94)

- peony (70, 96)

- bodice (71, 96)

[0] https://www.insider.com/gender-and-vocabulary-analysis-2014-...

Interesting. I (male) recognize all but one of the "female" words in this list (and can define most of them), but recognized only 6 from the list in the article, and could define only one or two. I wonder why the article's list is so much "harder".

(I recognized and could define all of the "male" words in both lists, so I do seem to conform to this stereotype...)

The recognition rates in the comment you’re replying to are much higher than the ones in the article.

I recognize all of them. I could recall the meanings of only some.

I remember from another study that "cybernetic" and "taupe" were highly polarized. which direction is an exercise left for the reader :)

"taupe" was a punchline of sorts in a very popular British TV advert back when we had 4 (maybe 3?) channels. So, people of a certain age in UK would all likely know it from that.

Older man here, c'mon, those are all easy.

Any thoughts on why Chrome on Android will offer to "translate" some of the words if highlighted, and "define" for others? Word frequency?

I'm a man--I knew all the male words and could define them. I knew seven of the female words and could only define one without guessing. Wow.

Same. I have multiple undergraduate and graduate degrees and consider myself wide read. I knew every single "male" word and none of the "female" words. Though, I did have some recognition of a few of the "female" words, I just have no idea what their definition is.

You were never exposed to Victorian novels.

> The male ones are tech/games/science

Science, war and... the last one.

“Shemale”?

>The male ones are tech/games/science

A lot of the left half was words I only vaguely knew, and that's because I've seen most of them used in games before. A good chunk just in Final Fantasy XIV alone, but the fabrics and clothing items tend to pop up a fair bit in the sort of item-intensive games that need to reach for words to make this particular shoe sound better.

I know espadrille from… the clothing shop in an anime golf game.

Interesting, I thought a lot of male words are related to games as well.

  aileron/azimuth/strafe: flight games
  bushido/yakuza/katana: martial arts or Japanese games
  howitzer: strategy games
  checksum: downloading games  
  degauss/teraflop: stuff for playing games
  shemale: ...okay maybe not this one...

Aileron, strafe (different meaning), howitzer - would all have come to me from reading WW2 stories or watching black and white movies in the 80s.

Azimuth, space.

Degauss, TVs

Checksum I think probably from Linux installs (around the millennium).

Teraflop, supercomputers.

Shemale ... hmmm, never saw it, but The Crying Game (TV show) I think would be the source for me.

Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?

> Conclusion, they're not gaming words you're just a gamer?

The claim wasn't "originated from video-games" it was "related to games." More broadly, aside from the direct technology terms, most of those are the sort of words that you only encounter in media.

Videogames are a medium that tends to stretch for more words to describe things (as do novels, compared to snappier media like film/music/tv), so it's a very likely point of first exposure for those of us young enough to have grown up with them.

It's funny, because those words sort of mark "cheesy romance/cheesy sci-fi" stories.

One of the things I was pointed to when learning a foreign language was: "Want to learn more adjectives? Read cheesy romance novels in the language."

> I literally knew all of the male words and zero of the female ones (I’m male)/

I find it kind of astounding that someone can know what aileron or azimuth is, but not what a doula is. The former I have never, ever encountered, whereas I feel like doulas come up as a routine topic in culture.

From the Wikipedia article, it seems like doula is of fairly recent American coinage. And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.

> And the fact that it's comes up as a routine topic probably says more about your social circle than anything else.

Not really. Unless my 'social circle' also has a monopoly on metrics like Google Trends, doula is a more popular term than either aileron or azimuth in the majority of countries for which metrics are available.

[1] https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&q=do...

The fact the there are more searches for a commercial service compared to technical terms is not indicative of anything.

I googled doula because I don't know what it meant. I don't think I ever googled azimuth or aileron.

I've known what a dually is for six decades, but I never heard of a doula.

I had never heard them called duallies (duallys?) before this millennium. First encountered the word at a drive-thru (-through?) car wash, where they were not allowed, and was left to figure out from context what it must mean.

> I think I half recognize jaquard as a fabric or fashion term.

Also one of the forerunners to the modern computer (its a type of automated loom that can be "programmed" using punch cards)

I knew some of them but my whole family works/has worked in textiles industry, so biased sample.

Yeah, male here, I knew only "damask" from the women's list, nearly all from the men's.

I'm a bit more in the middle. I don't know all of the "male" words, and I do know some of the "female" ones, though I still strongly lean "male". I'll ask my wife what she thinks.

No clue what "peplum" is, I'm afraid.

This startled me in the same way as a really excellent magic trick. You are convinced it's not going to catch you out, but then it does. I pride myself of having a wide vocabulary (or so I thought) and the premise sounded unlikely to me and yet I knew all the male words and didn't know the majority of the female words. What an eye opener!

Meh, the female ones don't seem to be English (at least a lot of them). The male ones are mostly international words.

If they’re not English, aren’t the female words also international words then too? Why’s that meh?

they're all english

- peplum - late 17th century: via Latin from Greek peplos .

- boucle - late 19th century: French, literally ‘buckled, curled’.

- pessary - late Middle English: from late Latin pessarium, based on Greek pessos ‘oval stone’ (used in board games).

- doula - 1960s: modern Greek, from Greek doulē ‘female slave’.

- chignon - late 18th century: from French, originally ‘nape of the neck’, based on Latin catena ‘chain’.

- tulle - early 19th century: from Tulle, a town in SW France, where it was first made.

etc

Interesting, doule in modern greek just means work.

Doula is one I would have never known had it not been for the pregnant women in my life.

Doula (δουλα) in modern Greek is female slave.

I didn't know there was an English version of the word (until I read the article ofc) so I assumed that that was also the English meaning.

Having had latin in school, i understood some of the female words via their latin word roots.

The female words are largely romance language loan words because they're related to textiles and fashion and, in the English speaking world, France and Italy dominate those fields (or did for a long enough time, historically, that tons of the terminology comes from their languages, anyway).

They're still English.

Agreed they're still English.

It's a little interesting how many from both sides of the list are loanwords, though - on the "male" side there's examples like howitzer, aileron, strafe and katana. I wonder if there's an effect here because loanwords are harder to learn?

I had the same thought! I (rather arrogantly) assumed that I would know most or all of the "female" words. Turned out I recognized less than half, and could define only a couple.

I actually knew most of the words; apparently though I'm in the minority of men for not knowing taffeta. After looking it up, I'm slightly surprised that tulle is so much lower than taffeta given that both are used in gowns and I run into references to tulle in poetry all the time[1].

On the other hand, I am in good male company for being completely mystified by peplum only to find it's another word for "overskirt."

I'm also in the 1/8 of all men in not recognizing the word shemale, though if wikipedia is right it's just she-male missing the hyphen? Perhaps I was primed by all of the fashion words but I read it with a french pronunciation...

1: e.g. https://poets.org/poem/because-i-could-not-stop-death-479 (written by a woman)

Arrested Development make a joke about exactly that French mispronunciation. https://arresteddevelopment.fandom.com/wiki/Shémale_shirt

I know that one from Will and Grace with the Gay spelling bee!

I got most of the women ones a lot are clothes/fashion/hair. I guess gay helps get a larger vocabulary ;)

Evidently you-all haven't seen Clerks yet. Lucky, you still get to see it for the first time.

I saw it 20ish years ago.

I'm a woman software engineer, and I recognize every one of those as a word, which I think was the criterion being measured. (There are a few on each side I can't define but have definitely seen.) I'm mostly floored by how many of the textile words people here don't recognize, to the point of thinking they're "fake words." Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment? I mean, espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not ever see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?

I think that’s the point of the article :)

> But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?

I recognized chenille (but couldn't remember what it meant, outside of knowing it was textile-related), but I'd never heard of damask or jacquard before. I do own my own home, but actually don't have curtains (blinds/shades instead). I do have a couch (three of them!), and these words never came up. I was just given giant books of fabric swatches, and I chose by look and feel. I don't recall any of them having descriptive names with technical terms, just a marketing name and item number.

Are you sure you aren't confusing chenille for Chanel? I made that mistake.

Guy here -- I vaguely recognized most of the fabrics, but I've bought plenty of couches and never shopped for a fabric by name, I just find a nice looking thing and flip through the swatches book until I find one I like. The only one there that's really recognizable by name in male clothes maybe is chambray.

I've never bought curtains, only blinds.

I recognized espadrilles because they make those for guys, but they're not common.

I had no idea they made espadrilles for men! (eta: or that they called men's shoes like that espadrilles.)

I only know them because I shop at huckberry, but maybe they're just winging it =). It seems like Toms makes espadrilles for men that were popular for a hot minute there.

Yeah, Don Johnson used to wear them on Miami Vice back in the day.

Guys (broadly) don't care what the name of the fabric on their furniture is, or what their curtains are made of, and do not shop using those terms. Even getting very slightly into male fashion has put me far ahead of most guys as far as knowing words common in male fashion. The vast majority of guys don't give a damn what "twill" is, or "bluchers", let alone what you call the kind of uphostry on their couch.

I recognized some of the fabric words. Were I not married, I would have recognized far fewer. I couldn't have told you what most of them actually mean, just that they're to do with fabric.

[EDIT] In fact, on reflection, I find it surprising that women (generally) shop for furniture based on anything to do with the kind of fabric on them, or would be particularly likely to be able to tell you what kind of fabric is on their furniture. I've always known women to shop for uphostered furniture the same way guys do, which is by looking at options until they see something that looks OK, then sitting on it to test. Curtains are another story. I'm pretty sure my wife does put in fabric names when searching for curtains, and might be able to name what some of ours are.

Shopping for uphostered furniture based on fabric type seems more like a rich/poor divide than male/female, to me. Like, it doesn't even get interesting until you're way out of most people's price range, does it?

> Shopping for uphostered furniture based on fabric type seems more like a rich/poor divide than male/female, to me. Like, it doesn't even get interesting until you're way out of most people's price range, does it?

That doesn't stop car people who can only own a single, entry-level car from caring about all sorts of dimensions that don't meaningfully affect the boring commuter experience. And each of those dimensions has vocabulary words associated with it, which adds to the fun. If you feel a connection with a domain, be it furniture or computer hardware, you learn all the words and form lots of impractical opinions (again, because fun). It's not exclusive to rich people.

All the fabric, fashion, and color stuff probably has all sorts of cultural implications. "Seersucker" just "screams" "summer", or something. Stuff like that. It's fun. But you only have space for so much of it in your head, so with all the other categories of things, you just go based on surface-level experience. Maybe there's a correlation between wealth and the number of topics you have lots of highly-specific opinions about? But my guess based on experience is that it's a personality trait independent of wealth.

AFAIK nearly all upholstry for the furniture most people buy is either fake leather of one sort or another, or some kind of boring synthetic fabric. Kinda like how all wall-to-wall carpet most people buy is synthetic fiber and not very interesting, until you get into stuff outside most people's price range, when things like wool and all kinds of weaves and styling and textures enter the picture. Below that it's like: How thick pile? Feel good on feet (if you're not used to better) because only cheap, or feel bad on feet because very cheap? With maybe some patterning considerations for very low-pile carpet. (to be clear, that's the price range I'm usually operating in when looking at that kind of thing, too—there's not much to get excited about)

I'd expect all the interesting choices with names that carry over into other parts of fashion not to enter the picture, with furniture, until you start to head into "designer" territory. The big overstuffed things out on the floor with price tags attached and big "SALE!" signs and such, seem rather same-y.

Sure, but again, think of the relationship with furniture and fashion like the typical male relationship with cars. Magazines, movies, celebrities, blogs, shopping way outside your price range without any intent to buy when you have nothing to do... I imagine all these things apply. Most guys I know learned about cars from hours of Top Gear, and drive used Honda Accords. I'll bet there's an equivalent for learning and caring about fabrics, furniture, and clothing.

Of course enthusiasts exist, I'm just skeptical that women knowing the names of fabric on their furniture is at all common under a certain SES level, at least. I've seen women care about and know the names of fabric in curtains, use those kinds of words to describe them, and shop using those words, in multiple cases. I've never seen it with furniture, but I also don't know anyone who can/would spend money on interior designers, go to the scary rich-people (for very small values of "rich") section of Nebraska Furniture Mart except out of curiousity, order custom or trendy vintage furniture et c. The most sylish and best-looking (but not most expensive) furniture I see in my regular life is from Ikea.

I can't even say for sure I've ever sat on a chair that wasn't just some undoubtedly-very-cheap weave of polyester or something else along those lines, but that's because my friends and family range (in background and attitudes, if not in income) from the Fussellian low-prole through his Middle. I'm assuming there are interesting fabric choices in the stores (or parts of stores) that no-one I know shops in, but there don't seem to be out in the po' folks' sections, where the majority of people shop. Doubling (or more) the price of a couch to get a kind of fabric worth remembering isn't on the table for most people—except, yes, maybe enthusiasts or people rich enough that that's the only kind of furniture they buy.

Have you ever touched a katana, travelled a parsec, had trouble with the yakuza or seen a howitzer fire in person? No probably not, and even if you did others haven't, all of those things people know since you are interested in and consume action/adventure media.

Consider a person who don't care at all about action/adventure stuff. They just care about making the nicest home possible. They read books about it, watch TV shows about it, watch movies about it, and remembers those details and forgets about all the actiony nonsense. Why wouldn't they know words of things they will likely never posses themselves? It is the same concept.

Again, I am sure enthusiasts exist. The original statement was:

> Do you not have curtains or a couch?

And what I'm skeptical of, specifically, is that the average woman has any idea what kind of cloth is on their couch, or shopped by that when they bought it, because it's probably not anything notable. I don't think "having a couch" means someone has the first clue what kind of cloth is on it, including most women. They might know the kind of cloth the hand-made pillows are, or a throw blanket, but not the upholstry, in most cases.

I think knowing what kind of cloth your couch is upholstered with, and shopping based on that, is probably more a rich-people thing than a women thing. Again, with exceptions for people who are just really into upholstry.

Curtains, sure. The idea of connecting cloth knowledge with upholstered furniture ownership just struck me as odd, because, again, I'm quite sure that most people, including women, don't get into that in detail, because it's not that important or interesting in the lowest 3 or 4 price tiers for furniture.

I definitely understand being surprised that men don't shop for curtains by cloth type (and so wondering how one could own curtains without knowing cloth-related terms), but not that we don't shop for furniture that way, because that's just normal for anyone outside, at least, the top 20% of income.

I'm less into that stuff than the average woman. I mean, I write software for a living, I read speculative fiction, I wear hoodies to work with no makeup. But when my husband and I finally had money for our first real post-futon couch, the one we ended up with happened to be upholstered in chenille, and I knew that, in the same way I knew it was a dark red color. We weren't shopping _based on_ that. We were shopping based on what was affordable. But I still knew the name of the fabric, and if I hadn't, I would have been curious what this unusual fabric was that I didn't recognize.

As a male software engineer, married and homeowner for 25+ years, I can honestly say I know almost none of those fabric-related terms. As in, don't even remember hearing them before.

I hardly even think about curtains, couch covers, etc. At most it's briefly, when we're shopping for that stuff. I'm super happy to leave those details up to my wife, who cares about them more than I do.

Yep, I purchased all the furniture for my apartment last year. The level of detail I could tell you would be "medium brown wood table that looks pretty nice" "chair made from laminated wood slices". Certainly couldn't tell you what kind of wood or what the color is specifically called.

I actually thought it was a study in a foreign language until getting to the bottom half. I did just buy a carpet the other day, but I don't think that involved any of those textile words.

In a way, it is. Most of these words are French.

> Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment?

No, never, and never plan on doing it. I currently rent, live alone and don't care. If I ever move in with someone again and that person cares, they will make all the decisions themselves, and if they don't, we'll just default to whatever's already in the apartment or hire interior designer if we'll be renovating.

And that said, I'm still an outlier in male population because I like male fashion, obsess with Rick Owens, Margiela, Alexander McQueen and some local brands, have my nails painted and wear a lot of accessories.

My wife is a dressmaker so I know every word you mentioned.

As a trans woman (assigned male at birth, lived as a boy / guy for 20+ years) - I barely know what "textile" is. It means "fabric", right? It's the thing that textile factories make.

> Do you not have curtains or a couch?

The house has the same curtains it had when we moved in. They're ugly, and I just ignore them. Except for the front window, where my spouse changed them for some reason.

My old apartment also had the same curtains it always had.

I have 3 couch-ish objects:

- A $100 futon that I bought when I first moved out to use as a combo bed / couch. My spouse also replaced the mattress on there, probably with something cheap off Amazon.

- A very cheap loveseat of unknown origin that a friend gave me.

- An old sleeper couch from my parents' house that they didn't want.

I think Jacquard is the guy who invented the loom that they teach about in every CS 101 class.

But no, I don't know what damask and Chenille are.

I actually love clothes shopping! I just don't think about furniture. It's so heavy and bulky. I love buying dresses but I don't think about fabrics. I know there's cotton, and denim, and fake leather, and then there's fabrics I never think about.

I don't decorate the house, I decorate myself. Sparingly.

Edit: For shoes I have "boots", "sandals", "sneakers", and "heels". I go to the thrift store and see what looks good and fits, and then I buy it. Sometimes I buy new shoes too, but I don't like dress clothes, so I just eyeball it without thinking about names.

Respectfully, can I ask a couple questions?

- Do you see yourself as a "new" or "recent" woman who's learning about female things now? (E.g. did you know what a pessary was? Did you read women's magazines in the before times?)

- Did your preferred sex (e.g. women for straight males) remain the same? Do you identify as straight or gay (or none of the above?)

It's none of my business, other than it helps me situate you (and maybe inductively other trans women) in these male-female ML things.

Sure, I love questions.

I still don't know what a pessary is. I didn't really read women's magazines before I transitioned, and I still don't.

I feel fine being a tomboy with "guy" interests. It's not an end goal of mine to go "stealth" (That is, pass as cis 100% of the time) or fit in to any female-coded social group in particular. Transitioning is something I do for myself, so presenting feminine but still being a little bit "masculine" in my interests and hobbies just doesn't bother me.

I've always been attracted to women, so I went from being a straight guy to being a lesbian. There's a few specific heterosexual scenarios where I can identify with the woman now, but not enough to say I'm attracted to men in general.

> it helps me situate you (and maybe inductively other trans women) in these male-female ML things.

Yeah I'm definitely speaking for myself here. The only things that are likely to be true of all trans women is that they use (or want to use, if they're still in the closet) she/her pronouns, and that they were not assigned female at birth.

Everything else can vary:

- Lots of trans people want to be stealth. It's safer on average, but I live in a queer-friendly town

- Not everyone wants to reclaim "queer" but personally I don't want to type out LGBTQIAA+ every time...

- Some trans people report that their sexuality changes (or they realize they're actually asexual) after they begin transitioning or after they begin hormone therapy. It isn't clear what percent of this is caused by the hormones and what percent is purely psychological.

- Most trans women don't say things like "I used to be a guy". I don't have an internal sense of gender, so I don't feel like the common story of "I was always a woman on the inside" applies to me, even though it applies to many trans women. When I was younger, people assumed I was male and I was fine with it, so I don't feel wrong to say I used to be a boy or used to be a guy. I transitioned when I decided that I didn't need an internal sense of gender - If I wanted to be a woman on the outside, that's all I needed, and maybe for me in particular, I only have an outside.

>> espadrille, sure, that's a woman's shoe guys might not ever see the word for. But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?

Ironically, Espadrille is the only word on that shortened list I ever heard of... but I think mostly because in my country its definition was expanded - certainly there were tons of Espadrilles for men. That may or many not be universal.

Literally Everything else on the purple list... no clue.

I do have curtains and a couch. FWIW I am a home owner in my 3rd owned residence (Condo, small house, medium house). I have never ever ever geeked out or cared about their material, by name, so I suppose there's a world still awaiting for me :)

Anyhoo, I do feel that the two lists are not symmetrical. It feels that one is fairly clustered around fashion/style/materials, whereas the other, while still having common threads, has technology, science, physics, video games, and nerdery. But is that exposing simply another kind of bias in me? Because the "male" words are familiar to me, I see more diversity in them than the unfamiliar words? Food for thought, but I still think bushido, shemale and terraflops are different categories regardless of gender :D

Fwiw, my classification:

Aileron - airplanes; howizter, bushido, katana - military; shemale - porn; strafe - FPS/gaming presumably; Yakuza - gangs; boson, milliamp,gauss, piezoelectricity, etc - physics; checksum, teraflop - comsci; parsec... physics, technically, but SciFi, practically :P

vs:

fashion/clothes/hair: peplum, boucle, ruche, chignon, tulle, chenille, voile, bandeau, kohl,espadrille, whipstitch, sateen, jacquard, damask, chambray

Verbena, Fressia - flower

pessary, doula - health

> strafe - FPS/gaming presumably;

Could be the reason so many guys know it, but it's another term with military connections. I was aware of it from military sci fi before I ever encountered it in a gaming context.

It's used in the Star Trek TOS episode "Shore Leave". That's where I learned it. Long predates most video games and military sci-fi.

Oh for sure. It's possible I've learned it from WW2 movies or stories initially.

Today though, it's such an inherent concept in video games, I feel it brings it from a abstract concept to a more practical reality.

Curtain blocks all light, couch needs to be comfortable for long stretches. What more do I need to know? My wife knew all words, male and female. She is a writer and translator and about some tech stuff I talk to much. But she couldn’t care less what the couch or curtains are made off. She doesn’t even care too much about the color; ‘not black or white please’.

I was shopping for curtains recently but the stuff that I cared about were the technical specifications: how much light it blocks, thermal properties, noise reduction, etc. What should I be looking for instead?

Ditto. As a guy I know three kinds of curtain: "black out", kinda blocks light sort of, and lets most of the light through.

> Have you never shopped for textiles

I mean, this[0] meme pretty much sums it up

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/441/150/c01...

From the image: "guys really live in apartments like this and don't see any issue"

And we mean it. I see only two problems:

1) no extra seating for pals—c'mon, at least add a couple bean bags and a couple folding trays (in fairness, those may be put away off-frame), if you're not even playing local multiplayer or having friends over to watch TV/movies, why even bother with this much?

2) it'll probably turn off any woman who sees it.

So not enough seating and women won't like it, are the only reasons I wouldn't be totally OK living like that if I were single.

[EDIT] I spotted a third problem! There's not a Gamecube or N64 or Dreamcast sitting on the floor halfway between the TV and chair.

The chair-TV axis should run the other way, so you can walk from the door to the kitchenette without bumping into the chair. Other than that yeah... it's fine... I'm not gonna shame people for being minimal.

After thinking about this a bit, I don't think the minimalism is the problem.

I think the main problem is that it looks both cheap and "low". TVs are "low" and having one so prominent makes the room look low-class. The room itself looks like a cheap apartment.

The fix is to buy more stuff for the room—and especially to put on the walls—to compete with the TV so it's less prominent, or to keep things very minimal but replace the TV (too "low") with something else and re-do the entire room (chair included) to fit some minimalist trendy design. Like if this were an ultra-modern concrete room or something traditional-Japanese themed (walls, windows, flooring and all) it'd be Instagram worthy, even if it were just as minimal—but those are expensive looks to attain. No one would be saying the sleek designer room looked unlivable because it didn't have pictures on the walls or curtains or more furniture.

Reminds me of Rusty's apartment in True Detective. His minimalism is (I think it's fair to say) at least in part a philisophical choice, which could look cool or respectable or impressive coupled with surroundings to make it so, but because it's a normal, cheap apartment with normal, cheap stuff (and not much of it), it just looks... well, cheap. That he doesn't care about making it nicer-looking and more in line with impressive takes on minimalism probably says something about his character—a preference for substance over appearance, for one, and maybe some other things.

Or how "minimalism" trends in pop culture are often coupled with a consumerist focus on expensive, nice-looking items that'll still impress and signal certain things about the owner, while the same thing on a small budget usually looks far less impressive (because it's mostly cheap stuff). Tiny house vs. trailer home or RV. All that kind of thing. That the good couldn't have been acquired cheaply is about as important is its practical functionality, to certain buyers.

Nobody wants to look at Wal-Mart minimalism, which is what this room is.

I don't see the issue either.

The single chair is a metaphor for loneliness and/or the death of couch co-op

I don't really have a problem sitting on the floor. It's carpeted.

My bachelor pad looked exactly like that except I had a sofabed instead of the recliner; surely everyone has one friend that refuses to sleep on the floor?

Before I was married I had a bed... but I slept in a sleeping bag on the bed, to avoid the complication of sheets. I did have a pillow, though. It even had a pillowcase.

Washing a sleep bag sounds more of a complication than washing a blanket, though.

In fact, high maintenance furniture would be even more of an issue than an empty room.

That photo always reminds me of my wife's apartment when we first met. Her living room was almost totally empty. A super narrow bookcase here, two chairs there, a table in a corner, and everything else was just empty. Swathes of unused empty space between a handful of pieces of furniture.

My house was the exact opposite: stuff everywhere. Any bit of empty space will immediately be put to use. And that is a thing my wife had a problem with, instead of all the empty.

> Do you not have curtains or a couch?

Couch is couch.

Anyway I have two sisters and remember not understanding how and when did they learn those words.

I do recognize some of those words, but as a non-native English speaker I was surprised about their spelling.

Don't worry, native English speakers are also surprised about their spelling.

Most of these words have unusual spelling since we got them from French.

Recently bought new curtains, and I selected on size, colour and made sure they were blackout curtains.

For the life of me (literally) I wouldn't be able to name the fabric.

...Do you not have curtains or a couch?

I've owned a home for over 15 years, and I still don't have curtains because it is too overwhelming. Current couch is Ikea, so I just wrote down the number, next couch will be leather.

Edit: One thing I know about fabric is that linen is made from flax, in 2016 I took a tour at a revolutionary war house where they used to make linen. I only went in because there was a pokemon in it, but it was still very interesting.

Not only do I have a couch, I made it and upholstered it myself. But I don't know what fabric it's covered with - it was just labeled as "upholstery fabric" at Joanne Fabrics, and I picked it because it looked sturdy and would fit with the room's color scheme.

I’m male. My vocabulary for couch material are: leather and fabric. That’s about it.

Don't be surprised that gender that mainly dresses in jeans and t-shirts doesn't recognize many textiles beyond denim and cotton fabric.

> Have you never shopped for textiles for your house or apartment?

45 years old, and no. Why would I do that? All my furniture and drapes are pretty much IKEA. I have some interest in clothing, but aside from the occasional Hallowe'en death cloak don't know much about fabrics other than cotton/polyester/nylon.

A minute shopping is a minute wasted, in terms of my interests. I don't want to spend any time thinking about it unless I have to, in order to accomplish some other goal. I tend to standardize on colours / outfits / style to make sure I don't spend much mental energy on fashion or shopping, while still not looking like I don't "get" it.

Dude you need to get a life

> But damask? Jacquard? Chenille? Do you not have curtains or a couch?

I'm pretty utility driven when it comes to curtains or couches. I'm just looking for something which does what it is supposed to and is not hideous. How does knowing damask, jacquard, and chenille help with determining if curtains block light and a couch is comfortable when I sit in it?

Any curtains I've ever bought are "the ones they have at Home Depot." Fabrics with fancy French names seem like rich people things, regardless of gender, no?

Hm. I don't think it's a rich people thing, really. Most of these words are describing the way the fabric is made, not the material it's made out of. A lot of guys own a chambray shirt, and if you google "damask tablecloth" they'll probably look familiar from restaurants. "Chenille stem" is the craft-store word for "pipe cleaner." You can find sateen sheets at Walmart and Target. Voile and tulle are not masculine fabrics, and I wouldn't necessarily expect a guy to know what they were, but they're the kind of thing a high-school prom dress might be made out of.

What do you mean textiles? We just buy the gray-ish ones.

I think during the reading of your comment I spent more time thinking about fabrics than the total effort I spent on it in my entire life.

It's fun to discover the bubbles that we live in.

I know "espadrille" because a man in an Agatha Christie novel was described as wearing them, so I looked it up (this was years ago). If the same book had named the kind of cloth used on a couch, tablecloth or curtain, I definitely would not have been interested enough to look it up -- for all I know there may have actually been such a description in the book!

I would have guessed that "damask" might have something to do with the damasquine steel used in weapons manufacturing.

Even as a gay man (and software engineer), I only barely recognized a couple of the female words from studying French. Otherwise I was clueless. I knew 100% of the male words, and use most of them regularly given my hobbies and interests (excluding the Japanese words and "shemale", which seems like slang uttered by young people, if I had to guess?).

And, no, I've never shopped for textiles. "Jacquard" is certainly very familiar given its relation to computing--and having lived and worked in Lyon. My parents even worked in textiles growing up, but I was nonetheless clueless.

TIL that I own a few nice Chambray shirts, courtesy of Google ;-)

Textiles? No I don't shop for "textiles". I buy clothing, furniture, and curtains and I really don't care what any of them are made of as long as it's not snakes, fire, or nails.

That's like saying "no I don't shop for 'electronics' whatever that means, I buy phones and TVs and computers." The umbrella term is what it is, whether you know it or not.

If you completely ignore the context of the conversation, sure. The way "textiles" was thrown out implied that by shopping for textiles, one should know and care about the actual material. The reply was asserting that they judge the individual items by their quality, not by knowing the material.

Our beauty is in utility. EDIT: Our other beauty is in Japan.

> damask

I think more men would recognize the Damascus steel (apparently named after damask fabric).

I feel about the same actually as a male software engineer. Have definitely at least seen most of the male dominated words, but could only approximate their definition. Not a single one of the female dominated list. Not once have I heard any of them. I'd be familiar with some bigger textile types and wood species like vinyl and teak, carpet lol, but that's about as far as it goes.

I'm a gay dude who cares a tad bit more than the average male about this stuff and even I have no idea what those are. I can guarantee you most guys don't know what those are, speaking from anecdotal experience. Gay or otherwise.

Damn, I came here to say gay guys probably know a lot of the female words. As a bi guy I knew most of the female ones, but I'm very into my fashion and read a lot of female fashion mags and watch things like Project Runway!

My gay BFF ex-husband knows his fabrics better than I do. YMMV.

That's probably why you're surprised that men don't know these words. You were married to a gay man.

No, I'm used to correcting for that. I was judging it by whether someone like my brother or the guys on my team would know it. I assumed they all would. Oops.

I buy my curtains & couches by look and feel. For pants, "denim" will go a long way. For shirts, I've learned to care a bit about fabric, because there are properties (whether you'll sweat in them; whether they need to be ironed all the time to look OK) that are not evident from look and feel alone.

To be sure, I recognized most of the fabric words as words (wouldn't have been sure about "sateen" as opposed to "satin"), but they only one I could have defined was "tulle".

And in my part of the world, espadrilles are not infrequently worn by men.

But it's funny how people who are utterly indifferent about fabrics can sometimes hold forth at length about the relative merits of PLA, PETG, ABS, PVA, or TPU ;-)

I’m a gay male software engineer and had the same experience as you, I knew most of those words and the few I didn’t I had heard a few times but couldn’t define off the top of my head.

And yes, lots of guys (even gay) just have zero clue about textiles.

Also a small nitpick, an espadrille is not a woman’s shoe, it’s a style as far as I’m aware. I have a pair I wear in the summer.

Yeah I stand corrected on espadrilles, and I was married to a gay guy for years so I should totally have known that one.

I’m pretty sure our curtains are made out of some sort of plastic (polyester or w/e) since they looked good enough and had the best sound deadening/insulation properties

You recognize all of them? You have superpowers! I only recognized 1, maybe 2 of the female words. When I buy textile stuff I only look for a couple of fabrics that I already know, simply because I don't want to enter another rabbit hole. I think this is also how most people shop about stuff that they need but don't really care much about.

My wife doesn’t do software. The only word she didn’t know was “checksum”.

I played a game of codenames, where I was the only guy on a team. I had an awesome clue- Flashbang: 4.

None of the women on my team knew what it meant. Every guy in the room did. We lost the game, but it was a very interesting social experiment.

Love that story. Makes me think playing Codenames in German, where all kinds of words are made by mashing other words together, would be a great advantage over playing in English.

When playing codenames in German you usually have the dictionary rule / Google rule.

If you come up with a word and you aren't sure if it exists check if it is in the dictionary or if Google knows it.

So no making up words like

Mixerversicherungsfahrzeug

Well, this rather makes the game annoying to play with people who think they are so clever and start constructing completely new words no one before them ever used. Which the rules don’t allow, by the way.

Sure, you can construct arbitrary new words in German. That works. However, that is certainly not the spirit of the game. Which the game does make abundantly clear in a quite long section of the rules. (I just got the game and its rules from our board game shelves, used the new OCR feature in iOS to copy and paste the relevant text into DeepL, cleaned up the translation and am now pasting it here with my own annotations in brackets. That was a cool experience.)

Excerpt from the rules:

Compound words

German is notorious worldwide for its compound words. There are two ways to form such in German. „Tischdecke” (tablecloth) is one word. „Mehrzweck-Fräsvorsatz“ (multi purpose milling fixture) is in principle also a word, because the hyphen merely serves to make it easier to read. „Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz“ (beef labeling monitoring tasks transfer law) actually used to be a real (and awful) word, which probably would have been a little easier to read with a few hyphens. (We won't discuss the bad habit of breaking up compound words in German with – incorrect – spaces here). Strictly speaking, then, all such words can be valid clues, but only if they correspond to actual usage. It is easy in German to simply invent composites: „Tentakeltrabant“ (tentacle satellite) would theoretically be a great clue for „Oktopus” (octopus), „Mond“ (moon), and „Auto“ (car, because of the East German car „Trabant”), for example, but since it's only a word creation that you can't find in any dictionary, you can't use it.

Prefixes

This actually belongs to the previous rule, but should be mentioned explicitly: Simply turning a word into its opposite by putting a syllable like „kein-“, „nicht-“ or „un-“ (non-, un-) in front of it should only be allowed if this word is colloquially used. „Unlebendig“ (unalive) is therefore not a permitted clue for „Tod“ (death), „untot“ (undead) on the other hand would be permitted as a clue for „Skelett“ (skeleton).

Love this

My favourite compound German word is Fledermausmann aka Batman.

With the literal English translation of flying mouse man.

“Fledern” is not actually a German word (in any kind of common usage at least). A literal translation of flying would be “fliegen”.

Apparently the word fledermaus originates 1200 years ago and is derived from “flattern” (to flutter).

"Fluttermouse-man" is even better.

For the less masculine (or clued-in) members of the audience, what was the code word? Something to do with shooting games?

Probably "grenade". A flashbang grenade is a bright and loud but less destructive grenade used to startle people before an attack. Widely used by American police investigating possession of trivial amounts of marijuana.

Something police use to disorient and theoretically help disperse a crowd - like a grenade except it creates only a mostly-harmless noise and flash of light.

> mostly-harmless noise and flash of light

Not that harmless. They don't throw fragmentation shrapnel but they are strong enough to punch holes into people when in direct vicinity. US police regularly throw these into cribs and kill or maim babies and toddlers.

Since it's codenames, I would guess some of the words on the board they were hinting at would be WW2/war/call of duty/video games related stuff like France, Ear, Lag, Light, Hand, Hurt, Mud, Radio...

In that game, the number said after the clue tells you how many of the words in play are related to the clue. So the word flashbang wouldn't be hinting at a codeword, but four of them.

So it could really be anything, e.g. bang, army, light and blind.

I once used this phenomenon to build a tool to reliably determine whether a male or female had written a given text. I was surprised how accurate it was even when trained on a relatively small corpus. Used CRM114. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRM114_(program)

I remember reading an article when I was a teenager about how very few men, but most women could tell whether a specific disease (don't remember which one) was caused by a virus or bacteria. It also claimed that the statistics were reversed for knowing whether the sun revolves around the earth or vice versa. I had no idea about the virus/bacteria thing, felt ridiculous to me. But intrigued, I asked my mother about the sun and earth and she responded: "I don't know, I've never even thought about it". Shocked to say the least. I learned that day that men and women are very different on average, despite being told otherwise my whole life.

ever since the neolithic society has had a habit of trying really hard to gaslight people about utter nonsense. and all we got for it was bread and penicillin.

I would have never guessed that some people could hesitate between whether the Earth is revolving around the sun or not. Wow.

I once met a woman that actually believed that the moon constantly changes in shape and luminosity.

Mind you, a fully functioning adult with a good job.

I'm not posting this to make fun of it, rather to say that in general people have absolutely no idea how anything in the world works. They know what they need to know.

I’ve met a man who didn’t know what a coffee maker was and a (American) woman who thought there were 26 states. The range of what people don’t know is so much broader than you can possible imagine.

(Also would be shocked if someone didn’t know which common illnesses were viral and which weren’t - seems like basic knowledge along the lines of heliocentrism to me)

> Also would be shocked if someone didn’t know which common illnesses were viral and which weren’t - seems like basic knowledge along the lines of heliocentrism to me

I suppose it is, but I didn't feel like it as a teenager, neither do I remember it being taught as opposed to heliocentrism. As a parent now, I'd definitely know but I guess my intrinsic interest for biology is much smaller than astronomy.

If you want to lose faith in humanity, start asking people which is farther away, the moon or the stars. Most people have no conception that the sun is a star, and would have trouble processing it.

How are those two things related? The sun is the closest star to us and is still further away than the moon. The answer would be “the stars” regardless of whether or not the answerer knows the sun is a star.

They are both astronomical facts with (to me) surprisingly little penetration.

I mean, I tend to agree, but on the other hand it takes a certain kind of curiosity to care deeply about things that don't affect our lives in the slightest. You could argue that astronomy and cosmology is important today, but during most of evolution it really didn't matter. I guess it started paying dividends for planning the crops and harvest etc, but still that is quite late. So in that sense, caring about e.g. disease, biology and our immediate lives here on earth seems a lot more "sane".

I recently met a Canadian adult, born and raised here, who didn't know our country had more than one time zone. We have six time zones.

So men know words related to male dominated areas like physics, chemistry, electricity, crime and war. Women know words related to female dominated areas like fashion, grooming and women’s health. I hate to say it, but water is wet.

What's shocking is that these areas are still gender-dominated. Why should they be?

Why should they not be? Men and women have widely different interests. Let it be.

Do men and women actually have different interests? Or have we all just been shoehorned into interests because someone decreed: "Let it be"?

Much of the research on the topic indicates the former. Gender bifurcation in jobs is even more pronounced in more egalitarian countries [1]. Babies exhibit different gender preferences for toys at ages less than a year old [2] [3].

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.h...

3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7

Why is it "shocking"? Why are you saying "gender-dominated" like it's a bad thing? Which areas are "gender-dominated" that you are upset about?

This was certainly not a water is wet moment. I was shocked how it looked like the female word list didn't even look like real words or at least not english words. I would expect to not know so much about some of the words but not to universally not recognize any of them at all.

It doesn't just look like it : they're mostly French words.

Sure, but I'm surprised how big the difference is.

I am very skeptical that ~50% of all men in the US know what thermistor means. The Methods section is not clear about whether people who "indicated" they knew a word actually did know what the word meant.

My skepticism applies equally to several of the words chosen as indices of rare comprehension: "The percentages of people indicating they knew the word ranged from 2% (for stotinka, adyta, kahikatea, gomuti, arseniuret, alsike, . . .)"

I strongly doubt that 1 in 50 randomly selected people could define "kahikatea" or "arseniuret."

You’re misunderstanding the paper. This is not the number of people who can correctly define the word, it’s the number of people who can correctly recognize that it is actually a word.

They don't. You can click through and take the test. It doesn't ask you if you know what any of the words mean. It simply presents you with words, some esoteric, some common, and some _imaginary_. You are simply asked to sort the real words from the fictional.

In case anyone wants to take the test: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start

I'm a techno-nerd guy but knew all those fabrics most guys apparently don't. In my early 20s I was really into sewing, which is fascinating from an engineering perspective, highly recommend as a hobby to get you away from that monitor. Both the tools and processes used in sewing are really interesting.

Most of the fabric words I have distinct memories, as an adult, of asking some one (usually a woman) what the word meant. Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.

>Tulle in particular was hilariously difficult to figure out.

Tulle is just orange bags, but not orange. The more you know.

I've gotten into sewing lately, and I know exactly what you mean about the engineering thing. I see sewing as a tool for designing and building custom "devices", like bag inserts, covers, etc. Do you know of any resources on sewing with that perspective? I have attended meetups, shopped at sewing boutiques, etc, but every person I have interacted with has just been interesting in garments, purses, and mending. Those are also interesting sewing topics! But the design skillset is a bit different, so I have a hard time getting help with my projects.

On topic: Even with sewing as a hobby, I mostly just care about the engineering properties of materials. I knew very few of those words.

Sorry, I don't have any good advice on resources for sewing non-garment devices. My first instinct would be to visit a fabric store for upholstery, neoprene or other outdoor fabrics. We have a fabulous store "The Rain Shed" nearby and they have patterns for things like you mention. It's a small store so they might answer the phone and be able to direct you. Here's their patterns link:

https://www.therainshed.com/shop/Patterns--Kits.htm

Recently I read an interesting article about how smoke jumpers make their own kit (suits, bags, etc.):

https://www.webcenterfairbanks.com/content/news/Smokejumpers...

As a female not born in the US, I am familiar with most of the male words and only some of the female. I'd say the distribution is affected more by US culture than gender.

The data they used was ~3/4 USA, 1/4 UK.

I think it says more about stereotypical interests rather than anything intrinsic about the sexes. The male words are actually just nerddom, science and tech(incl military tech), and porn. The female words are just fashion and reproductive words. May I guess that you're more into science and tech than you are into fashion?

> and porn

Are you talking about Shémale? Pretty sure it's a fashion brand.

>Are you talking about Shémale? Pretty sure it's a fashion brand.

Thought he was joking at first, but nope! They're a fashion brand. Google "Shémale pearl necklace" and you can see their stylish jewellery range!

Ah yes, a perfect term to image search at work while doing a little Valentine's Day shopping.

My apologies. I was making an Arrested Development reference. Then AussieWog went ahead and, well... I'm a bit surprised they did not get flagged.

Stereotypes, in this case, seem to be borne out by the data.

Table presents p = Prob(knows word | male).

The unconditional probability P(male) is around 1/2 or a little less.

Then Prob(male | knows word) = Prob(knows word | male) P(male) / P(knows word).

---

Now, we're not given P(knows_word), but assuming answers are from a reasonably balanced sample, we know that

P(knows word) = P(male)P(knows word|male) + P(female)P(knows word|female) = [P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)]/2

Going back:

Prob(m | knows) = 0.5Prob(knows | m) / 0.5[P(knows|m]+P(knows|f)]

Which gives us a formula. E.g. for peplum, Prob(m|knows) is

13%/(13%+64%) = 13/77 ~= 16.8%

For "shemale":

88%/(88%+54%) = 88/142 ~= 62.0%

So sometimes the actual "maleness" or "femaleness" of the word is overstated, while sometimes its underestimated.

This isn't a critique of an article, it's a literal comment.

--- Edit:

The drive to procrastinate today is strong. Here are the probabilities for all words.

https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1-UP3qTJ3GZ3BpsA0ZNa...

Interesting numbers, but it'd be vastly improved by being able to filter for age ranges too.

Gauss and Degauss are the two that jumped out at me. I'd be curious to know how many people of either gender have encountered it, if they're young enough to have never lived with CRT TVs.

You can also encounter those words in a high school or college physics course, which is where I associate them.

Same, although I also know degauss as it relates to CRTs. "Gaussian blur" -- almost always mispronounced -- is also relatively commonly encountered by anyone doing image or video editing. Though of course, that's a completely different term described by the same person's name.

How is it pronounced, and how do you think it should be pronounced?

The name is pronounced something like "gouse", and the blur is fairly commonly pronounced "goss-ian".

Huh. Must vary by community. I've only heard them pronounced in concordant ways, and closer to your first.

FWIW, the Google Search pronunciation guide[0] says Guassian like "gouse-ian", which is the only way I've heard it pronounced (US east coast). It's also what I see as the phonetically-written pronunciation when checking a couple dictionaries[1], and this English blog post[2].

[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=pronounce+gaussian&rlz=1C5GC...

[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/gaussian

[2] https://painfulenglish.com/2014/01/26/how-to-pronounce-gauss...

I am sure that it's just a case of people having read the word and never heard it spoken.

I think I first ran into "degauss" in a documentary talking about German magnetic mines in WWII.

I'm a man, and would have answered no to degauss, although I'm 32 (so old enough to have had a crt tv in college). I remember the word upon looking it up though. Gauss I would have assumed was a trick question (he's a person!), but on further reflection I remember that it's a unit for something or another in electrostatics.

...Gauss is one of the most important mathematicians who ever lived. The gaussian distribution is the single most important random distribution there is. The standard 2d coordinate system is often also referred to as the gaussian plane. I'm guessing more men know him due to this reason: more men are in STEM.

You call the Cartesian coordinate system a Gaussian plane?

Yeah; that's not right. Only in the more limited context of a complex plane would I think of "Gaussian".

>The standard 2d coordinate system is often also referred to as the gaussian plane

Hmm, never heard of this. I wonder what are the reasons, Gauss really had nothing to do with coordinate systems. Even the complex numbers link is due to Euler, De Moivre and many many people before Gauss.

I have a half-joking hypothesis it's due to Germans not wanting to attribute things to a french mathematician, but that still doesn't explain why they went with Gauss and not Euler.

Euler was Swiss

I remember growing up and thinking that Gauss showed up all time, everywhere: Gauss's law, Gaussian elimination, Gaussian distribution, Gauss formula, Gaussian filter, CRT degauss, Gauss cannon.

Those are the ones I remember, and I went into CS, I don't want to imagine how it was in math.

Likely that many boys have seen "gauss rifle" or "gauss cannon" in video games. I doubt they know about degaussing CRTVs or mine-sweeping vessels.

Even if you completely ignore the meaning and usage context of these words, there are some significant differences.

The male words are sharper, rougher, more incisive. Azimuth, teraflop, neodymium, yakuza. The female words are rounder, smoother, less threatening. Verbena, doula, sateen, chenille.

This is extremely interesting and not subtle at all

Are you referring to how the words "feel" in your mind (≈ average of a cluster of associated words) or about the sounds in the words?

Plosives (PaT), sibilants (Sassy/SHow) or glottals (CoCKpit) sound "sharper" to me than their voiced equivalents (BaD, Zoo/menaGerie, GooGle). Fricatives (FaVorite, baTH/baTHE) or nasals (NuMber) or taps (RoLe) tend to sound longer and softer.

It's definitely both. It's not just the physical sounds I make when pronouncing them, but the mood and the overall "atmosphere" of the words that is different.

Reminds me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

A lot of the "female" words are fashion/style related. For a long time, France (and Italy) dominated the fashion world, so a lot of technical terms around fashion are French, which probably explains the distinction.

Hmm I'm not so sure about that. To a textile worker, the difference between sateen and corduroy would be as sharp and incisive as the difference between azimuth and altitude is to an astronomer.

This is an interesting observation, because the next question should be whether they know the word exists or they just "feel like" it exists (see sibling comment about the Bouba/Kiki effect).

Fascinating; as a man, I can roughly define every single better-known-by-men word in the chart ("bushido" gave me the most trouble); whereas of the better-known-by-women words, I recognize only three and can define them very poorly (without checking my answers to a dictionary: I believe that "kohl" is some kind of mineral cosmetic [historical?]; "verbena" is an herb; and I'm most sure of "sateen" being a kind of cotton cloth which can be used in bedding).

Kohl is that store where you can buy last season's clothes for like 80% off ;)

This was interesting but just wanted to note they defined "known" based off of a test where you are asked yes/no on a series of words based on if they are an actual English word or made up. Not remotely if you can accurately define/use them and they didn't go into details on how often people were voting "yes" on words that turned out to not even exist. I would be absolutely shocked in a random sample of American men if even 20% could accurately define "aileron" or "azimuth".

I was also curious about the population of participants. The paper has this to say:

> The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited.

> we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions.

That's a pretty large sample, although I wonder how they recruited the participants. It may be in the paper but I couldn't find mention of that in a quick skim.

It's worth noting that, based on the paper, this is really "words known better by males (who complete free online quizzes) than by females (who complete free online quizzes)". This likely explains a significant amount of the fashion and video game words. For example, it seems unlikely to me that 60% of all US and UK women know the word "peplum", but reasonably plausible that US and UK women who complete free quizzes on the internet also spend more time browsing clothes on the internet than the average woman, and would therefore have more knowledge than the average woman about clothing terminology.

You don't have to buy clothes on the internet to know what a peplum or other clothing terms are. Most clothes are not bought online.

I'm going to disagree here. I'm a woman and I had the same results as every man replying here: I recognized all the science, game, and action terms and almost none of the fashion and textile ones. Never once when I have gone clothes or makeup shopping (always exclusively in person) have I encountered any of those terms, written or otherwise. I feel I might have been more familiar if I actually shopped online where these words might be displayed.

There is no way 48% of males know what a thermistor is. This whole statistic is biased to the point of uselessness. Cute, though.

Makes me wonder who did they ask.

From the paper, participants didn't need to define the word. They just had to recognize that it was a real word [1]:

> Participants and the vocabulary test used

> For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus. At the end of the test, participants received information about their performance, in the form of a vocabulary score based on the percentage of correctly identified words minus the percentage of nonwords identified as words. For instance, a participant who responded “yes” to 55 of the 67 words and to 2 of the 33 nonwords received feedback that they knew 55/67 – 2/33 = 76% of the English vocabulary.

Granted, there's nothing stopping a participant from responding "Yes" to a word they can't define. But I think that's more likely to happen on words that the participant knows of even if they can't define it.

Here's the test, BTW [2]. It appears to still be up.

[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9#...

[2] http://vocabulary.ugent.be/

this was the word that made me question the data as well. Had never heard of a thermistor until EE classes in university

I would wager that some percent of them confused it for thermostat.

If one knows the words "thermal" and "resistor" one can pretty easily guess the meaning.

Weird choice of vocabulary to study - fabric and fashion words stressed for women, and techno-babble for men. Was the vocabulary completely random, or was this result forced by anticipating the outcome?

Random. The results shown here are the words with the largest disparity between the sexes. The total list was almost 62,000 words.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9

Thanks for the link. Here's a little bit of detail about their sample gathering, which I found interesting:

The test was made available on a dedicated website (http://vocabulary.ugent.be/). Access to the test was unlimited. Participants were asked whether English was their native language, what their age and gender were, which country they came from, and their level of education. For the present purposes, we limited the analyses to the first three tests taken by native speakers of English from the USA and the UK.Footnote 1 All in all, we analyzed the data of 221,268 individuals who completed 265,346 sessions. Of these, 56% were completed by female participants and 44% by male participants.

The site encourages participation with a hook similar to that used by many online quizzes:

Word test

How many English words do you know? With this test you get a valid estimate of your English vocabulary size within 4 minutes and you help scientific research.

Is this a representative sample? I doubt it. Probably it went viral in some specific communities.

Maybe there's still something interesting to learn from it... but I'd take it with a grain of neodymium.

The "male" words aren't technobabble though. They're just scientific language. The data certainly seems to very clearly represent the impact of the historical bias in education, entertainment, and the world in general to emphasise "science" as a pursuit for males and "craft" as a pursuit for girls.

Not necessarily clearly external bias. I can think of an alternate possible explanation.

Not just craft, for "doula" there's a reason women know that word more than men do.

pessary too, though oddly, I knew that one.

Same (male) but only because it came up in the context of reading Wikipedia deep dives that led to court cases blocking their import[1] and the Hippocratic oath, which, oddly enough, prohibits administering them (along with abortion):

"Similarly I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippocratic_Oath#Earliest_surv...

Edit: But even then, I didn't know e.g. what they looked like, or anything about them specifically.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._One_Package_o...

Or the innate biological preferences caused by biological sex?

Even baby male monkeys prefer to play with trucks while baby female monkeys prefer to play with dolls.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2755553/

There are other differentiating factors there that could lead to the preference choice that are not related to whether something is mechanical in nature. Things like color, texture, etc. have been shown to have strong biases between the sexes.

A possible control they did not employ during the study would be to have a series of toys that were identical in all ways except color, for example.

Also *very* worth noting:

    As shown in their Fig. 1, when play time with toys is examined in human children (Berenbaum and Hines,1992) and rhesus macaques of all ages, males spend significantly more of their play time with the “male” toy(s) than with the female toy(s), while females spend about equal times with “male” and “female” toys. This is true both for frequency of interactions and in time spent playing (Hassett et al., 2008). **Therefore, one key difference between males and females in these studies is that males actually show a toy preference while females do not!**

(Emphasis mine)

These aren't trucks and dolls though. It's a pretty big leap from "female monkey babies prefer anthropomorphic toys" to "adult women are biologically predisposed to a deeper understanding of textiles." A cultural explanation is much more parsimonious.

I think the point is that a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology and nearly all is at least influenced by biology.

The ultimate counterexamples would be societies where women are in charge of the engineering/construction and to my knowledge there are none which is a sign that there's something deep within our psyche which drives these interests. I'd love to hear counterexamples if anyone has them though.

If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying.

> a significant part (majority?) of our culture is defined by our biology

That's a very strong claim. Obviously everything's influenced by biology to some extent (imagine what society would look like if we had no thumbs), but "to some extent" is doing a lot of legwork there, and it's quite a reach to say that the majority of our culture is defined by biology based on that.

Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields — how many societies have had engineers? Ours plus Rome plus not many others. But look at something like cooking, which is old: There's tons of weird gender stuff there that varies between societies. Why is grilling masculine if baking is feminine? Other societies have similarly odd gender-food rules too.

> Engineering and construction are pretty modern fields

The mental tasks required of engineering are far, far, far, older. Things like abstract reasoning, distance estimation and measurement, rotation and scaling of objects, maps, and abstract shapes in one's head, ability to standardize and compute measures and weights, etc, were all adaptations that improved our effectiveness at hunting, building shelter, and both defense against, and offense toward, opposing tribes.

Modern engineering is an enormous pile of abstractions on top of "Grog think rock weigh seven stick".

I'd settle for any society where women built the huts. Nearly every society has needed to construct some form of shelter or build some sort of tool. Basketweaving comes to mind.

Grilling and baking are great examples of what I'm talking about. Actually, in the past baking was seen as a masculine activity. Ovens used to be much more dangerous than now. You had a dedicated town Baker just like you had a Blacksmith. Over time with the invention of gas and electric appliances and the proliferation of cheap baked goods, baking became a luxury. Now it's a feminine activity. If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine. I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.

To find some sort of culture that isn't influenced by biology, we would have to find some aspect of culture that we invented in our heads. For example, religion or philosophy or law. There are a ton of examples out there. But when we examine the culture that organically forms, I think there's a biological explanation for most of it. Maybe even all.

> I'm sure there's a biological explanation out there for why men are attracted to danger (or at least don't mind it) while women are repelled by it.

I think you have the motivations a little incorrect. My guess would be that men traditionally took care of the dangerous jobs because they wanted to protect the child-bearing members of society from them. As a fertile man, you're more likely to pass on your genes if you keep women out of harm's way.

So yes, this does count as a "biological reason" for men and women going different ways, but you seemed to be implying that these biological reasons had more to do with brain structure and development, which I don't think is supported by what we know.

But you have to ask why men step up to take the dangerous jobs? We didn't sit down and have a Socratic discussion about who takes which job. I posit that it's more than merely logic, that the motivations are rooted in our intuition.

It's also simply not true that this is not supported by what we know. "Common sense" says that men die younger than women. And indeed we can find statistical proof of this wherever we go. Take car accidents. No one wants to get into a car accident. Yet men are 3x more likely to die in car accidents than women.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/192074/drivers-in-fatal-...

Getting into car accidents yourself doesn't prevent child-rearing members of society from getting into car accidents of their own. What else explains this gender difference? Maybe men have worse vision? Worse reaction time? Are women stronger at turning the wheel than men? Maybe men are more distractable than women? I think not. People who have been driven by both mom and dad know: men drive more dangerously than women do.

Every statistic related to safety shows that men are more willing to get into danger than women. Even in suicide rates, men are more likely to succeed, even with women trying more often.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190313-why-more-men-kil...

There are so many examples like this. It's almost certainly true that men have a higher predilection for danger compared to women that is driven by some biological factor. If you think it's not the mind, then you would have to come up with a different explanation for every disparate piece of evidence out there. Not that it's impossible, but there's a simpler conclusion to draw.

There are significant behavioural differences between the sexes in basically every animal. Even among mice the males are more inquisitive and take more risks than the females, so you find many more males than females in traps etc. Female animals tend to care much more about children. There is no reason to believe that humans evolved past this and all our differences are just us planning it out rationally.

> If danger determines masculinity/femininity, then that would also explain why grilling is considered masculine.

I think this is motivated reasoning. From what I can tell, the "grilling is manly" thing started in the '50s (well after cooking stopped being dangerous) and is mostly limited to the United States (instead of being universal, as we would expect with something biologically-motivated). And what's the difference between frying, roasting, and grilling? All involve using a gas-operated cooking device to cook meat (assuming you own a gas stove); they're all equally safe.

Not only does this strike me as being cultural, this strikes me as obviously cultural. And yet you dismiss that out of hand and go looking for a biological explanation ("grilling is extra dangerous") that doesn't really line up with the facts of the example. So it seems to me that you're engaging in motivated reasoning — assuming that masculinity can't be a product of culture, reaching for biological explanations even when they don't really make sense.

The discussion here is: what parts of culture are motivated by biology? It's obviously cultural. But what is motivating the culture?

Also interesting to me that grilling is manly started in the 50's. That seems to be about the time that household appliances like microwave were getting popular, no? Maybe men who liked to cook needed to find a manly outlet.

FWIW, as an amateur historian I did a high-level talk on the history of barbecue, especially as it relates to the grilling styles found in California (popularized as "Santa Maria BBQ"). Long story short, men were running the pits not only in the 1950s, but also the 1850s, 1750s, 1650s, etc. Why? It might have been because meat was the product of the hunt. It might have been because running a barbecue could mean many hours of hot, smoky, dirty work that often involved physically strenuous activity. For quite a lot of American history, barbecues were often conducted for large numbers of guests and may have started the day before with transporting fuel, digging a trench, pre-heating the trench overnight, processing one's pigs, mutton, poultry, beef, or what have you, making your coals and keeping the supply up throughout the cook, etc. Also, the cuts of meat used were often far larger/heavier than we're used to — the original Santa Maria Barbecue cooks used top blocks of beef and similarly large cuts, not itty bitty tri-tips.

Famed barbecue "masters" were universally men, though if everyone is being honest much of the hard work at many large barbecues (with hundreds of guests) was actually performed by black men (or Californios, or what have you depending upon the location). Large barbecues were generally tied to political efforts or organizations, festivals, and the like. During the Depression there were large government-subsidized barbecues so everyone could get some meat in their bellies and enjoy one another's company during those tough times, and there again we see men and women typically taking on disparate roles in the cooking process.

Contemporary accounts of the barbecues of years past generally have women inside doing not easier work, but different work. Making pies, side dishes, baking, etc. Even the pre-Columbian/Spanish Chumash tended to split their work pretty strictly, with women doing things like grinding acorn flour in bedrock mortars with the kids, while the men fished, hunted, gathered shellfish, etc. Contemporary drawings of various indigenous peoples show them smoking/grilling fish and iguana, but again everyone in the images are male. I confess I don't firmly know what kind of sex differences existed in the roles played in the cooking American slaves did for one another, something I really should remedy, but when it came to big gatherings the differences were apparent and as I wrote above.

I can't really speak to causality, but in terms of time scale the M-F patterns seem to substantially pre-date the 1950s.

Oh, and fun fact: the offset smoker was invented in Texas in the 1970s. That little factoid seems to blow people's minds...

Holy crap thanks for the bbq facts!

computing used to literally be womens work.

Computing back then was more like typing numbers into machines rather than writing software. It's akin to typewriting jobs which were also dominated by women.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

I don't know much about computing as a profession, but wasn't it just algorithmic arithmetic?

yes. but perhaps more apropos I am old enough to have met some of the women programmers (not calculators) from the earlier generation when I started in the 80s. its completely anecdotal, and you may attribute this to many factors, but the likelihood that someone I met was more competent, informed, and/or more clever than I was greater for females than males.

Well it's not about who is more clever. I think the research shows that its pretty even between men and women after all is said and done. It's about what naturally interests us and there are differences there.

maybe. I just have seen a time when it wasn't unusual to see a highly-regarded and competent woman in software. not that they were the majority. so I'm alot less inclined to just accept that there are important genetic differences that inherently make women less suitable for that kind of work.

maybe team genetic-differences should be adopting the burden of proof

My grandmother was a programmer working at a university, so I know. Nobody here said women aren't suited for that type of work. It is just that when video games became mainstream in the 80's you saw an avalanche of boys wanting to learn to program, and ever since then the field has skewed heavily male, like most other engineering fields where you build things that moves. My grandmother might have been a programmer, but she was never interested in computers as a hobby, it was just work to her.

Note that the number of women entering the field didn't decrease, it was just the number of men increasing so much.

Interesting. Maybe it's video games. This was true for me. If that's the case, we might see a surge of female programmers since more women become gamers than before.

Again, no one is saying women are less suitable. It's a question of how many women are choosing to do this sort of work versus men.

>> "If we could figure it out then maybe we'd figure out how to get more women into the STEM fields. Lord knows we've been trying."

It's only a mystery if you ignore the ample writing and research on the topic. Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted. This also impacts men in fields they don't dominate like nursing and K-12 education, so it's got nothing to do with stereotypes about how different gender assignments cope with adversity (the usual thing wheeled out to explain it).

1) I think it's worth removing all gender-based forms of adversity from every field. These do exist in STEM fields in the forms of biases and microaggressions. It's not evil - it's human. It's just what naturally happens when a field is dominated by one group and our minds forms patterns. We must always take a conscious effort to combat it.

2) Women may not be interested (organically) in certain STEM fields. It's still worth figuring out if we can change that. Only after understanding what it would take should we have a discussion of if its worth it. The benefits are real. Every field could benefit from having more diversity in perspectives - just like every species benefits from having diversity in traits.

> Most people don't want to be somewhere they're not wanted.

That doesn't explain why countries where women are more free to pursue what they want have fewer women in STEM. For example, in Iran and Saudi Arabia more women earn science degrees than men.

[1]: https://engineering.purdue.edu/ENE/News/the-stem-paradox-why...

The ability to recognize verbena as a word is not encoded on the X chromosome.

Are you sure there's not a gene for fabric preferences?

It is your job to prove that.

It is not our job to disprove your half-baked suppositions.

Its HN so you never know with things like this, but i think it was a joke meant to emphasize the ridiculousness of the argument that women are genetically predisposed to liking fabric craft.

No, but the preferences and life choices that would lead to someone being exposed to and learning that word are in part due to sex dimorphism.

GP is obviously not saying that. He's saying that sex chromosomes cause differences between men and women which also manifest in different preferences which cause a small gap in knowledge between the sexes.

> dolls

Small clarification: the feminine-analogous toys used in the original (Hasset, 2008 [1]) study were plush rather than the more common plastic dolls sold to children. Although the difference may or may not be minor, it does remind me of the famous Harlow monkey experiment where monkeys showed a preference for the soft “mother” figure over the biologically sustenance “mother” figure.

Edit: Another commenter has already perpetuated this very misunderstanding it seems. Out of the Hasset female-coded toys, only one (a Raggedy Ann doll) was “anthropomorphic.” All six others were animals.

[1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2583786/

> historical bias

How historical are you going back here? I'm almost 50 years old and as far back as I can remember, everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls and crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.

I'm pretty sure that in most of my science classes (biochemistry/biology), outside of advanced grad-level organic synthesis, which then had a "fighter pilot jock"-vibe, the gender ratio was 50/50 if not more female than male, so this trend goes back 20+ years. But if you look at the list, the scientific terms skew physics, and for... cultural reasons, I suspect the non-specialist penetration of a lot of those terms probably skews male.

Exactly. Many respondents who know "parsec" don't know it because they're astronomers, they know it because the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve of 'em.

Oh wow, you are right! I came to comment on exactly my surprise on seeing "parsec" as one of the "best-known" (whatever it means in this study) words.

Or, in second place, because you played the game on TI-99/4A.

> the Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve of 'em

That's a good point - I wonder if the question was "do you recognize this word?" or "can you correctly define this word?" (followed by a quick check)

This study uses self-reported recognition of the word. Later in the study they compare their results to other tests that try to identify understanding of the words' meaning.

I also wonder if there's any gender differential between male and female respondents in willingness to say they "know" a word that sounds vaguely familiar... and if the sound of a word also affects people's willingness to take a leap. The study doesn't seem to have included fake words or anything like that to catch guessers out (and I don't think that was relevant to what they were trying to determine, anyway).

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that male respondents are more likely to take a leap for "piezoelectricity" or "thermistor" than they would be for "peplum" and "chignon".

I'm not sure where you lived but geography and politics likely plays a factor here.

It absolutely wasn't this way when I did my schooling and I'm younger than you, growing up in Canada.

Another point to consider, aiming at a target doesn't mean hitting it. It's why you haven't seen the outcry about boys in stem until the past half decade or so. General public opinion and culturally ingrained sexism are very difficult boats to steer.

I am sure it's a regional thing as I experienced that part of his statement:

  everybody with any authority was working non-stop to teach science to girls

but I cannot say the same on that one:

  crafts to guys - even to the point of rejecting guys from science classes.

"...rejecting guys from science classes."

Do you have a source for this?

I'm almost 50 years old and I don't recognize your childhood.

If technobabble, I'd be disappointed to not see "interposer" or "hash table" listed.

"Historical bias in education" seems like a bad justification that just draws on modern buzz words. Girls outperform boys in every subject in school, science included, and always have in our modern education system (last century or so). The idea that girls are getting worse education is not plausible.

On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know - which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.

https://time.com/81355/girls-beat-boys-in-every-subject-and-...

> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion

Why? There are only two possible answers: Either there's some sort of genetic predisposition for women to care about fashion (quite a claim!), or that disposition is a product of the way we raise girls.

Given that we know our culture strongly associates fashion with women, and we don't have any evidence for some "fashion gene," historical bias in how we rear our children is simply the least presumptuous hypothesis available to us.

If we view fashion as part of an effective female mating strategy, which it observably is, then it’s unsurprising that success at that intrasexual competition would be selected for.

If we were to enter a mental clean room where nothing we knew of life on Earth could accompany us, and then sit and speculate about the nature of men and women, I agree that we would have no reason to suspect an interest in fashion might be related to biology. At least, I doubt I would come up with the connection.

In reality we know that there are biological differences between men and women. We know these differences affect the brain in terms of size and structure. We know these differences affect the mind in terms of personality and emotional experience. Should we expect that men and women have identical biological predispositions towards areas of interest? I would say no. Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...

> Given that we then expect to find differences of interest stemming from biology, and that we have found a difference in interest, and that there isn't a plausible alternative...

There is a more plausible alternative though. Our society demonstrably raises boys and girls differently, and we know for a fact that the way we raise children affects who they are. In fact, women were much more common in the field of computer science until a cultural shift around the '80s that saw computers portrayed as "boy toys" [1], so we know this affects things as complex as career aspirations too.

Contrast that plausible and well-supported hypothesis with the other one: "There are biological differences between men and women. They affect many things. Therefore it's plausible that there is some effect on personal interest. Therefore it's safe to assume that any given difference in personal interests between sexes can be attributed to biology." This isn't even logically sound; it's fallacious to say that, if X affects Y, any behaviour exhibited by Y is likely attributable to X.

And this is still all a-priori non-empirical reasoning; there's no evidence that sex is responsible for areas of interest at such a granular level as this, while we do have such evidence for culture (e.g. pink used to be a boys' colour [2]).

[1]: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/what-happened-all-... [2]: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/12/health/colorscope-pink-boy-gi...

Person 1: I've just measured a thousand men and women. I've found that men are typically taller than women. This is because our society systematically underfeeds infant girls so they don't grow to be as tall as their male counterparts.

Person 2: That's horrible! Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?

P1: None at all.

P2: But, society at large tacitly endorses the practice of underfeeding young girls?

P1: Not at all. In fact, it would be a horrible scandal and a severe and rare crime if anyone were found to be intentionally depriving an infant girl of nutrition.

P2: So... why do you think this is the explanation for height differences?

P1: Well, it would explain my results in a way that accords with my political beliefs.

Your argument seems similar to Person One's argument. There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain. As I've previously referenced girls outperform boys in science (as well as every other subject) and have for the last century. It would, in fact, be a huge scandal if some school system were found to be educating girls differently.

You are pointing at these really small things, like commercials targeting toys to boys versus girls. You assume that these small things cause major changes (as opposed to companies targeting their commercials where they find they get the best return). You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.

> Is there any evidence of this systematic underfeeding?

I provided evidence that our cultural ideas of what careers are and aren't masculine impacts women's interests in terms of career path. You provided no evidence that interests are a product of sexed brain chemistry. Your height analogy makes no sense and doesn't match up to our discussion.

> There just is no evidence that we are not educating girls fairly in science or any other domain.

I never argued that schools discriminate against women by offering them a worse education in those areas. I argued that our culture encourages certain interests above others in boys and girls by gendering those interests. Consider the example I linked, where the number of women pursuing careers in computer science fell precipitously after messing with computers became coded as a "boy hobby."

> You ignore giant influences like the education system which does a better job educating young girls in science and math than boys.

Girls get higher marks than boys in every subject, and the discrepancy is actually less pronounced in STEM fields [1]. But this is really irrelevant to our discussion.

[1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/girls-get-better-...

Have you been around babies and small children? Or spoken with someone who has raised them?

Differences in character are evident between children, and statistical differences between boys and girls are very visible.

Your argument has a flaw. It's right we don't have evidence for the fashion gene but it's also right we know the female and male brain are different and behaviors are different (even if we cannot pinpoint the cause of the difference we see different behavior). It is sufficient to consider the genetic explanation as possible.

Anything's possible, but I find it less plausible, given that "we know sex has some effects on behaviour" is weak evidence, and we have strong evidence that gender norms affect life choices in adults (such as female CS majors declining after computers became a "boy thing" in advertising).

> which is that women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion

So, this is actually quite a modern phenomenon. At some point in the early 19th century, high status menswear started evolving into a near-uniform (it's finally started to pull away again a bit in the last few decades), while women's clothes started going in the opposite direction, especially in the early 20th century. But before that, high fashion was very much a male-focused thing. If someone in 1750 in Europe was obsessed with different fabric types, they'd be likely to be a wealthy man.

(For an example of this, see Pepys' Diary; he goes on about fashion constantly.)

I don't believe we have anywhere near the data needed to reliably describe the vocabulary or interests of the people of the 19th century. Most of all history is narrowly focused on the goings on of elites - which may, or may not be broadly representative. I don't think we have quantitative studies or surveys of populations from that time.

Oh, yeah, we basically only have what the elites wrote. Fashion would generally have been an elite thing then, though; it simply wasn't accessible to normal people.

You're dismissing millennium due to a generation of reasonable parity in education, and entirely dismissing culture passed between generations of women. My grandmother wouldn't really know any of those fabric words, she grew up on a plantation in the 30s. Probably means she's not a woman.

> On the other hand, there is an obvious explanation, which, I feel all of us with sufficient exposure to both genders must know -

I read this and immediately assumed you were going to say its obvious that women are taught how to behave, and that they're taught things related to what they're supposed to know.

Your comment alone is enough proof that society is telling women they aren't supposed to like science. Any young engineer reading HN may start/continue to subconsciously question their affinity to the field.

Women ARE taught that they don't belong in stem fields, and that science is not for them. I was picking out books for a 5yo girl and boy twins for christmas recently, and the nice lady at the bookstore told me to get a glittery princess book for the girl and a scientist book for the boy. It was not a malicious act meant to keep women out out science, but just something we take for granted in society. Fromm a young age we tell girls what is and isn't for them, subconsciously.

IEEE has studied the affects of engineering graduation and job retention, and its correlated to a womens self-identity as an engineer and their perception that they belong. Starting from a young age, society is damaging that perception. I'll link one study, but they've done a number of studies, including tracking workplace treatment of coworkers, and women are consistently treated worse and are questioned more and trusted less.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5673614

Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed? Since women's relative disinterest in science apparently comes from society, and there are many societies on Earth, surely there are some societies in which women are more interested in science than men, right?

All of this stuff seems like obvious post hoc rationalization. You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women. Are we socializing young girls to be accountants, claims adjusters, or advertising specialists? If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants? (Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender)

The survey you cite is pretty meaningless. They survey some engineering freshman and then find a few questions where the results are statistically different between men and women.

"We conducted t-tests to determine gender differences in survey responses. We found that women tended to have lower self-efficacy perceptions: they reported less confidence in their ability to complete the physics requirements (5.75 vs. 6.13, p < .05), less confidence that they could do well in an engineering major during the current academic year (5.75 vs. 6.07, p < .05), and less confidence that they could complete any engineering degree at this institution (5.08 vs. 5.41, p < .05). In contrast, women reported higher outcome expectations than men: they reported greater agreement with the statement that engineering will allow them to find a well-paying job (6.48 vs. 6.33, p < .05), and that doing well at math would increase their sense of self-worth (5.66 vs. 5.46, p < .05). "

So - women tended to have less confidence but higher expectations for their career and that's supposed to be evidence that society teaches women they can't be engineers?

> You know girls aren't taught to be engineers because relatively few engineers are women

No its clearly that there are few engineers who are women because we teach them they shouldn't be. You got it backwards. There is ample evidence of this.

> Accountants, by the way, are close to an even split on gender

Thank you for this example, by the way. I've never seen a single children's book on accounting, and its pretty even. I've seen lots on science, doctors, construction, nursing, etc. And they're pretty non-even careers.

> If girls are just reading sparkly books about princesses where do they get the idea to become accountants?

Because sparkly princess is not a job and most people need a job. We're not teaching anyone to be an accountant from a young age and people do it because it interests them. But when we teach only men to be engineers... we get a gender imbalance.

> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?

This is a really weak argument. 1. There are plenty of matriarchal societies throughout history. 2. The identity of science as we see it in western society today is a relatively western idea that doesn't translate well historically. Euro-mediterranian history dominates our cultures idea of science, and that cultural history is male-leader dominated. Plenty of societies across the world had women do things, but we just learn about what happened in Europe (from men).

As you said in another comment, women outperform men at school, so why do they have lower confidence? That seems like a discrepancy that has a logical social explanation (they're told they don't belong, so they aren't confident in their work). Studies have proven this. Unless you think women are unconfident as a matter of biology? (studies have not proven this)

Aside, have you ever talked to a female engineer? MANY will tell you they were not pushed to be an engineer, and that they face sexism and were constantly told they're not supposed to be there. Many experience higher levels of criticism and mistrust over their work compared to male coworkers.

Sorry, but it's just not a serious thought to think that the subjects of children's books decide the demographics of careers later in life. Especially when you think decades of education do not.

Regarding your response to my quick question - which matriarchal societies are you thinking of? The "identity of science" (whatever that means) is not really at issue. We are discussing the reason behind why women know more fashion related vocabulary and men know more science and technical terms. If the "identity" of science changes over the years, that wouldn't seem to change whether or not men have greater interests in what we now call science.

Your theory, that career differences are caused by acculturation is first, absurd. The theme of children's books, kids TV shows, or whatever you posit is part of this, is minuscule compared to spending 8 hours a day in a classroom. Yet, you think the minuscule effects outweigh the massive effects, and nevermind the widespread effort to get girls into STEM.

Second, your theory is soundly rejected by evidence. Girls choose not to go to engineering because of those kids books, but they perform better in math and science throughout school? Where is the effect of these books in K-12 education?

Third, your theory predicts everything and therefore nothing. When a survey shows that girls have lower confidence and higher expectations, well, that's because their confidence is undermined by our patriarchal society! If the results were reversed, and girls were more confident but had lower expectations, why, that would be because despite their abilities they knew they wouldn't be treated fairly by our evil patriarchy!

Conversely, I would say that if you survey a thousand people, divided them into two groups, on dozens of questions, you will probably find some that have significantly different results. I would think the results were meaningless unless they confirmed some prior prediction or were all aligned in some surprising way. That is, actually, what I think about that survey.

No you're directly wrong, and its not absurd. The affects of those childhood books (and of course, the views and behaviors outside of literature of people who choose how to distribute them!) have a huge affect on someones life. Early childhood development is disproportionately important in someones growth as an adult.

The cultural affect of childrens books, tv shows etc doesn't stop in a classroom. Teachers are often complicit in furthering stereotypes and tropes throughout someones academic career. But again, someones home environment, even when smaller in time than a classroom will be more impactful.

Women do better in the classroom, but despite their performance, report that they feel less confident in their abilities than their male peers. At the same time, they say that a stem career would have a great improvement on their life. Then they choose to pursue another field, and you're interpretation is that they must like fashion more as a nature of human biology? THAT is absurd.

Again, if you ever talk to women in stem (or those who left stem), you'll quickly find tons of people who directly tell you why they act and think the way they do. And it is what i've been saying - they're being made to feel like they don't belong explicitly and implicity. I can confidently say you've never had a serious conversation with a woman about this topic based on how you discuss this.

> Quick question: In which societies on Earth is this trend reversed?

Iran, oddly enough; about 70% of STEM graduates are women.

More generally, though, the trend in the west has been, for any given subject, it's all male, then there are one or two women, then a few more, and suddenly a tipping point is hit and it's 50/50 within a few years. This happened to medicine and later biology and then chemistry in most places. I'd expect the pattern to continue.

My, uneducated, guess on Iran is that college-eligible men are likelier to go to madrassas or the like seeking government or religious power over education. Do you think that, or some other explanation, is right, or do you think that women are better represented in STEM in Iran due to a more egalitarian childhood?

How does that match your comment:

> women tend to be more interested in fabrics and fashion and better learn that vocabulary while men are more interested in the science (or science fiction) and technical terms and learn that vocabulary.

So why are there women in stem if they really want to learn about fabrics?

Or, do you really mean that women only enter jobs when men leave openings?

I think you're forgetting the term "tend". Even in Iran my expectation is that if you were to repeat the experiment from the featured article you would get similar results.

I assume though that Iran has a smaller portion of the population in college and that men are preferentially pursuing political or theological power over STEM education. Of course, these are assumptions which is why I'm asking questions to understand better.

Do you think that in Iran their children's books more prominently feature female scientists?

Neither. Obviously Iran is not an egalitarian society; the idea’s absurd. However, Iran is also not Afghanistan; most people have a broadly secular edification. Iranian men do go to university in quite large numbers.

I think you’re missing the obvious explanation; the gender biases in STEM may be basically arbitrary; go to a very different society and you’d expect them to be different.

We see this in the west, too. From the 40s through 70s, women were far better represented in programming than today in western countries. Part of this was a legacy of the war, but that can’t explain the whole thing. And in the other direction, practically all chemists in the west were men until the 80s or so; this fairly rapidly flipped and now most new chemists are women in many countries (similar tipping point shifts happened earlier for medicine and biology).

I think you're seriously misreading the above person's comment to the point of putting words in their mouth. Saying "X gender is less likely to be interested in Y" is not saying that people of that gender "aren't supposed to like Y" as you put it. It's making the observation of different gender distributions. Women are more likely to be interested in equestrian sports. This is an objective fact, there's more than 2 women for every man in equestrian sports. This doesn't mean there's anything wrong with a man that shares this interest.

It's also difficult to see a correlation between weaker gender roles and more interest in STEM among women. If anything, the correlation is reversed: more equal countries see less women interested in science and technology [1]. Different preferences of toys among infants are observed even before they're able to talk [2][3].

It seems to me that these claims of societal influence or bias is rooted in the assumption that everything is going to be perfect 50/50 distribution, and thus anything that doesn't conform to an equal distribution is evidence of some sort of pressure or bias. On what grounds do we claim that 50/50 interest in science and technology is the default? This is almost never answered, people just postulate it as fact.

1. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/the-more...

2. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/07/160715114739.h...

3. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-019-01624-7

I have my doubts that most people can give a correct definition for those scientific words. So even if one person is familiar with the general area, it doesn't say much about their education. Perhaps about their preferences in media.

Plenty of female otaku/anime fans out there but anecdotally I'd say that it's still primarily male. Nowhere near as male as it was in the 90's/00's, though.

My daughter is a huge anime fan but yes, still primarily male.

My daughter is a huge anime fan, but she's not watching the anime where the yakuza defend their bushido with katanas.

oh is she watching the one where the katanas defend the yakuza from bushido? its really good

I take it she's also not watching the ones where the space robots jump into the air at azimuth 90, disengage their ailerons to get out of the atmosphere, then travel several parsecs in an femtosecond with their boson drive?

Amusingly I only knew "freesia" because its the title of a manga.

Also the name of a Gundam theme song.

(Japan likes using a lot of flower references which they think give a classy Western literature feeling but which we’ve never heard of.)

> Weird choice of vocabulary to study

I think you're confused. These are not words they chose to study - these are the words with the largest difference in recognition, from a larger corpus of words.

You're projecting some kind of pre-bias onto the researchers that I don't think is there.

Perhaps you're right. I read their methodology and it seems fair. They did solicit demographic info from the participants, but didn't mention if before or after word testing. There's still wiggle room there for bias, but probably not.

When I was picking a name for my startup, I was considering Sidewinder. I liked it because it implied speed/accuracy and indicates lateral movement (my startup makes a speed-reading tool that helps you move your eyes more quickly).

When I asked my girlfriend what she thought, it didn't resonate at all. I asked around further, and it turned out men reliably knew about Sidewinders and thought the name was cool, and women thought about the snake, if anything. I had been concerned about the war-related connotation, but I dropped it from my shortlist because the name didn't work at all with half the population.

Very random, but in the 80s, years after my Grandfather immigrated to the U.S. from Denmark he started a company called Sidewinder which made ladders that wheel/move around the sides of farming silos for painting/repair, etc. Funny to see it show up in your comment 40 years later :)

I'll add 2 things here in the spirit of the discussion.

One, I dabble in amateur fiction writing as a hobby. And I'm a man, but a big percentage of my readers are female. One thing I've been hit on the head with repeatedly, when getting feedback from female readers, is how often how sensitive they can be about the exact choice of words or phrasing I use. My 1st draft will be a certain way. After getting feedback from female readers, I often have to revise the text to tweak the words and phrases in it, to make it less distasteful or alienating for them. Note... this is NOT me "perceiving" it to be this way -- instead it is based on what happens factually. Over the years since 1st getting bitten by this (decades now) I've learned enough about the gender differences in reading perception that it doesn't bother me as much anymore, and I can more often make my 1st draft such that it lacks these kinds of "gender perception difference bombs".

Basically, as a fiction writer, you must be VERY aware of gender differences, at scale, in order to produce the most popular final draft. Any experienced writer will tell you this.

Two... I got into the Wordle playing thing, and in recent weeks there was a solution word which caused a minor kerfluffle among fans. I was on Twitter one day and stumbled into threads where lots of women were complaining about that day's solution word. Some said it was soooo bad, that when a female player would only hear indirectly about how icky the word was on Twitter -- without literally seeing the answer -- they could often guess what it was, in 1 attempt. just 1 attempt! And they would post screenshots and result shareouts to prove they could solve it in 1 attempt.

The word was "moist".

MOIST!

I remember it when it happened because for me, for whatever reason, it had taken like 5 tries to solve it, with no outside social media hints. Yet lots of women were nailing in 1 or 2 tries.

So... never tell me that males and females are identical or somehow "equal" when it comes to "neural language wiring" or at least not in their reading perception biases.

We are different. In broadstrokes. At scale. Reliably.

Interesting. If someone were describing a word as "icky" in Internet subcultures, I'd guess "moist", not because it's actually icky, but because it's Internet subculture.

It's sort of how if someone on the Internet said "He's got a fedora", I would conclude that they're saying "This guy is a dork". In the real world, it would likely be a statement of fact, and based on the girls I hang out with, a statement of fashion.

Without evidence to back it, I'd hypothesize that this is a subculture effect, more than a gender effect.

Like a lot of other commenters here, I knew all the male words and some of the female ones (which I mostly picked up after we started trying to have children or actually had them), but what I found most interesting was going down the list of words and getting stumped at exactly the spot where more women than men know the word (but now I know what chambray is!).

It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women. The fashion-related words (taffeta, chignon, espadrille, etc) being known more to women makes sense to me, but I'm not sure why the three Japanese words are more known to men.

I would think, given your username, that you would have a feeling that these male words are more 'badass'?

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the gender ratio of "people who have seen Akira" is probably 10:1 male:female

come on, I made sure every girlfriend I ever had learned all about it shortly before breaking up with me!

It's interesting to me that the Japanese words in the table, "bushido", "katana", and "yakuza" are more known to (this dataset of) men than women.

Those three words in particular feature heavily in lots of video games and films. That could explain some of it.

The Yakuza were in a season 8 episode of The Simpsons in 1997. That would help make it a perfectly cromulent word for a lot of people.

japanese cultural appreciation is heavily indexed on nerd culture and that's heavily men. just an additional audience to skew the metrics.

Weird Al should have a yakuza-themed album with about half nerdcore and half alternately shouting and squealing in Japanese.

Sounds like the rappers from Snow Crash.

For the closest real-world analogue, check out m-flo.

Cool.

I was just thinking there ought to be an AI chat agent that can recommend music based on themes and mood, perhaps with a periodic, paradoxically-opposite sense of humor.

The biggest weebs I knew in college were women. Sailor Moon is woefully underestimated in terms of how much it contributed to redressing the nerd gender balance. I won't say that it's completely redressed, but female anime fans and japanophiles are considerably more prevalent now than in decades past.

Now, the bits of culture that concern swords and warrior codes of honor? Yeah, those are boy things, mainly.

yeah that reminds me its something I’ve noticed too.

although I encountered something similar, in my schools they were a very distinct subculture defined by their affinity to Japanese culture, whereas what I see now amongst younger people is that many more attractive popular well adjusted women (people in general) are ok with or into anime, that style, and non-US cinema at all. I like this outcome.

My guess is that their martial link is why more men know of them, rather than the fact that the words are Japanese. I would suspect that the same would hold true for martial words of non-Japanese origin as well.

Like "Howitzer" (~85/~55).

A code of honor, a sword, and a mob. These are stereotypically masculine topics, and also words that appear in video games and movies, sometimes as the title itself.

I'd be curious to see the skew among native Japanese speakers - I'm assuming the test in the link was run on Americans.

English speakers. If you look at the original study they have a similar breakdown for US vs. UK, which is almost more interesting.

I'm skeptical about the result for katana, though. Women are almost as likely to know "boson" as "katana"?

I doubt that particular word (katana) would be quite so permanently stuck in my head if not for watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles a lot as a kid. That was a show that was for-sure aimed at boys.

The other places I could imagine having encountered it enough for it to have stuck are action video games and Japanese or Japanese-influenced action cinema & anime. I have some very confident guesses at how male and female interest rates in those would break down.

The word 'boson' was in the news quite a lot for the last decade or so, due to CERN. The word 'katana', not so much.

Dudes are all secretly gangsta OGs working up the food chain to be a baws someday.

Oh, the fast food chain, you mean.

If those jobs haven't been automated yet. Brought to you by Carl's Jr.

https://shiftwa.org/fast-food-chains-announce-automation-pla...

An intersection of military history, video games, and weeb-dom. 'Yakuza' is notably a popular and long-running video game series

Might be interesting to do a similar experiment by age: people in their 20s vs 40s vs 60s, say.

My late grandfather (would've been 90's) didn't know quite as many questions on Jeopardy! as Ken Jennings, but within a std deviation.

When I was 20, if throwing out the sports deck, no one wanted to play Trivial Pursuit with me. Lol.

Note: "known" means recognized versus non-words.

oh that's interesting — I assumed the bar was being able to loosely define the words.

Ah, that's a good catch. I'd have trouble providing a precise definition for a lot of these, but I know them. ("servo" is some type of engine; "degauss" is a button I pressed on CRTs to make them go "boing"; a "doula" helps with birthing somehow in a non-medical capacity.)

A servo is the movey bits that move the movey bits on the killbots.

Pretty sure a servo is where you get petrol and a sausage roll.

Most of the words I "know" from the female list are ones I've encountered in articles or novels that I didn't need to look up to get the gist of what I was reading. Same for a few on the male list, I've never needed to do anything with a thermistor or servo so I can only assume I recognise those words from SF.

100% of Australians knows what a servo[0] is

[0] https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Servo

Wish we had more females commenting here. For what it’s worth, my wife knew hardly any of the “female” words either.

One data point here - I knew all the female words and 15 of the male words. I definitely feel more confident about what the female ones mean, though.

It might still be a biased sample. Probably most people on this website regardless of gender are interested in science and technology.

Another data point for you: I knew ~80% of the words from both sides. Because I read sci-fi, study Japanese, and sew. I feel like I broke the test.

I wonder what it means to "know" a word.

If I know that progesterone is some kind of a hormone, but I have no idea what it does, do I know this word?

There are several words in this chart that I cannot associate with anything, nor recall having seen them before. At least personally, I would say I know a word by knowing under what context it can be used, and I don't even have that.

The test subjects were presented the "real" words with fake words mixed in, like "stoinka" or "gomuti" or "alsike".

So to "recognize" a word simply meant, did the test subject says "yes, this is a word used by English speakers", and not "yes, I could define it or give an example of the word's usage in a correct context".

Diverse results on a word comprehension test probably correlates with cultural diversity better than ethnicity does. It could be easier and more reliable to assemble a culturally diverse workforce via word comprehension clusters than by personal history. It's not hard to see how diversity measured like this can contribute to a team. It would tend to add people who have interests orthogonal to each other, broadening their joint perspective.

Wow, I know 100% of the male-identified words and none of the female ones.

I expected more overlap.

I'm not the only one in comments to say this, but perhaps it is interesting to see multiple people reporting this.

From the linked paper:

I think a lot of commenters are understanding the task as "define with confidence" rather than "recognise as a meaningful word". I couldn't give you a firm definition of many listed words, but I only don't recognise 2 of them.

It's definitely interesting, but I think it raises questions about sample quality and respondent confidence at least as much as it provides information about sex & gender differences.

Look no further than this for evidence of men's famous underrepresentation in the textile arts.

If I'm reading this right, the results were gathered via setting up a website, spreading the word, and allowing anyone visiting the website to participate. I'd expect these results would mostly only be relevant to the "very online."

Yeah, these results don’t pass the smell test. As a woman, I sincerely doubt the percentages quoted for terms like pessary and doula- if you and your peers aren’t having children you’re unlikely to have heard of them. And doulas are a more recent phenomenon in the US, I doubt many women over 60 or women in lower socioeconomic classes are familiar with the term.

Same for men. I can’t believe most men know what a checksum is. This test says more about the population of people who took it than anything else.

It looked reasonable to me. Pessary was part of regular sex education for my school. I was surprised the numbers were so low, but this might be sex education in the US not discussing this.

Checksum you'll encounter as a term when you use newsgroups, torrents and often on the download page as an MD5 checksum when you download software.

I just learned about pessary last month, after my second child and two different sex ed curricula.

And what percent of American adults use newsgroups or torrents, or even download software these days? It’s surely not the majority (software downloads notwithstanding).

Would have been a good idea to throw in a word that doesn't exist to get a feel of how honest the answers were.

I'm skeptical half the men really know what piezoelectricity is, for example. Much less 75% being able to define boson. Maybe if the survey was at an engineering college.

I suspect by “knowing the word” the implication is “familiar with/have encountered”, vs “being able to define correctly”.

The study was literally picking words from non-words.

"familiar with the word" doesn't mean "knows exact definition or the facts from the first paragraph of the wikipedia article".

"a boson is a particle in physics" would be adequate definition, no need to actually know the details. Similarly, "piezoelectricity" is "the thing used in electric cigarette lighters / guitar pickups", no need for details. Women who know about fabrics don't necessarily know how they are manufactured.

It's fuzzy. I know exactly what a terraflop is including that most people use it to refer to 32 bit floating point operations by default but it can still mean other widths if specified. I thought a parsec was somewhere between 2 and 20 light years which is correct but still imprecise. I know damask is a fabric associated with dresses I've run into in books but have no idea what it looks like. So do I know 1, 2, or 3 of those words? It's fuzzy.

I feel like anyone who did secondary school physics would have come across piezoelectricity though? I certainly did.

I would be surprised if any of my male and females friends from Georgia Tech ('07) couldn't identify and accurately describe every technical word in great detail, or even talk about them for hours on end. The same apples for colleagues I work with daily.

Among the general populace, I'm guessing that's less likely.

The underlying study, at http://vocabulary.ugent.be/, gives nonsense words in addition to real words to establish a baseline.

What does it mean to "know" a word? I have heard/read most of the male words hundreds of times, and probably used them myself, but asked to define them I would be either inaccurate or unconfident. For example, I know that ailerons are flaps on an airplane, but I'm not sure which ones. I know that a femtosecond is a small unit of time, but I'm not sure what fraction of a second.

I find that giving a precise "dictionary definition" of a word is actually quite hard in general for many common words.

Anyway, the data is based on [1], which asks "I know this word"/"I don't know this word". It's also available in Dutch[2] which is a bit different and asks "this word exists"/"this word doesn't exist". Both tests include both actual words as well as made-up words. I did this test a few years back and my "score" was about 80% for Dutch (my native language) and 60% for English. I was a little but surprised by the fairly large gap between Dutch and English, since I've been speaking English almost exclusively for the last ten years (on account of living abroad), which goes to show just how hard it is to really learn a language to native-levels.

[1]: http://vocabulary.ugent.be/wordtest/start

[2]: http://woordentest.ugent.be/woordentest

In Wittgensteinian fashion, if you can use a word, you know it.

My initial impression glancing at that list was that it was maybe taken from a survey of French speakers, because the first few words looked totally alien to me. Then I recognized freesia, then a few more words coalesced. All told, I'm more or less familiar with only 5-7 of the "female" words but every single one of the "male" words are very familiar to me.

I wonder what the ages of the selected participants in the shown data set were.

I recognized all of the male words, but I sent the female words to my girlfriend, and she barely knew any. She suggested that younger women might not know these words.

That could just be a self-rationalization for not knowing them, but I didn't see the paper address the issue of age much, or generational changes.

I wonder how that plays into this.

I suspect the 388 participants in this study were from top educational backgrounds. These words are very niche. So a pool of average people are not going to score 80-90% success on any of those words. That may also indicate why there is a such a large difference. When you compare people who are already at the extremes, you tend to see larger differences than comparing people at the mean.

Ahh, that's a very good observation. I'm surprised that wasn't my first thought as well.

All right, who is going to write the adaptive wordle that learns which answers are easiest for you, so that it can select the harder ones.

As someone who was raised in the United States as male and then became female later in life, I know every word in the female-prevalent list, and my knowledge of those words can primarily be traced to either my long-term desire to be a woman or to research performed during my transition.

The majority of these terms are simply women’s fashion terms, and aren’t considered “men’s” fashion terms to the majority of US men. ‘Pessary’ is domain-specific, and I only learned that one a couple months ago, because it turns out to be essential knowledge if you’re considering your options during transition.

However, while I can say I recognize every word on this list with certainty, I can explain 100% of the men’s words but only about 50% of the women’s words. Clearly I have more work left to do on my transition :)

I am a tech nerd woman brought up in a seamstress/gardener household. Every single word I have no issue defining and using in context. However, I shared this with a group of women who are not in tech or fashion and they didn't know much either. I think this is pretty flawed.

The had me in the first half (not gonna lie) thinking that I just don’t know any of these words because I’m not a native speakers… But then I knew all the words in the second half. I’ll be showing this to my female techy colleagues, see what they get. I know for a fact that they know many of the latter. So I’m curious how this distributes over age or wage etc.

Of course, the true meaning of this statistic is in the absolute numbers which aren’t shown. Ie the number could be representing a massive amount of males and show tech bias, the other numbers could be representing a very low amount of females in fashion (it seems like).

This feels like a reflection of social norms... most (but not all) female words are related to fashion and most (but not all) male words are related to STEM. I do think it's weird that words like "yakuza", "katana", and "bushido" (which are related to Japanese culture) are more common among men; is this an effect of, for lack of a better word, weeb/anime culture among men?

I'm surprised that "verbena" is so low on the list; I found it to be a really common scent especially in hair products (specifically lemon verbena). Maybe that's my female bias?

Not only anime. As a kid American shows and movies were full on “ninjas” and “karate”. My favorite cartoon was TMNT and one my favorite movies was Karate kid.

I think yakuza, katana, and bushido have less to do with weeb/anime culture than video games and movies.

I bet yakuza, katana, and bushido could all be picked up watching Kill Bill & playing some Call of Duty set in WW2.

They made the word prevalence table available, but I can't load it into my spreadsheet program.

The question I'm trying to answer is, are the words in Table 2 the words that differed the most by gender, or were they selected as representative examples?

In other words, if the title of that table is just "Words known better by males than by females..." should I interpret that as meaning "[some examples of] words known better by males than females and vice versa", or "words known [best] by males and females, and vice versa"?

Not a very big sample size but I do find it interesting how the males lean towards more technical terms. A result of sexism in education, not biological differences, I'm sure...

Seems like all you men don’t know enough about fabric and garments. This may be leading you to purchase poor quality garments. If I may recommend a solid introduction: How to Assess the Quality of Garments by Anushka Rees.

https://anuschkarees.com/blog/2014/05/01/how-to-assess-the-q...

I was shocked at first to see that most women didn't know what a "servo" was, then I remembered it means something different in Australia...

I did not know “strafe” which I guess a lot of guys do?

“Gauss” I just thought of the mathematician; forgot it was a science thing.

I’m not at all sure what to make of where “shemale” ranks

I think strafing has something to do with combat aircraft (a strafing run, probably fly by shooting?), but where I know it from, is early shooters (haven’t played any in over a decade, not sure if that word is still used), strafing was moving sideways.

edit: my guess for the actual meaning was close-ish:

> Strafing is the military practice of attacking ground targets from low-flying aircraft using aircraft-mounted automatic weapons

> The word is an adaptation of German strafen, to punish, specifically from the humorous adaptation of the German anti-British slogan Gott strafe England (May God punish England), dating back to World War I.

-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing

And I might as well post the gaming page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafing_(video_games)

Strafe a pretty commonly used word when dealing with first/third person shooter video games. Probably self explanatory why more guys know it.

Re “shemale”: I wonder what other slurs they included in the data set. I have a hard time believing “shemale” is the only slur with gender polarization.

Strafe in shooter games is a movement relative to the direction you're facing without turning.

So on a standard two-stick controller layout your left stick is strafe and your right is aim.

I expect more people have played halo than flown planes.

"Shemale" is such a great punchline.

I was reading these thinking "Oh fuck, I know all the male words and none of the female ones, I'll never pass as a woman with a vocabulary like this".

At the bottom, "Shemale". Tada! That's why I know all the male words! I'm a sh**ale!

Hrm. I wonder did they just ask if people recognized them? I'd be very surprised if 40% of people could define 'azimuth', say.

I think that's all you can test with words. Separate the nonsense words from ones with a defined meaning.

As someone who is not a native-English speaker, it is interesting to see a couple of familiar words in male category such as katana, yakuza, azimuth, etc. Probably due to my gaming hobbies...

And none of words in female category ring a bell to me, which is not surprising since I do not even recognize most of them in my native language.

I’m super interested in the “shemale” terminology. What’s the stark difference or explanation there? The others I can generally buy as nerd culture, but what does that have to do with a gendered slur?

And similarly, why isn’t there a similar reflection of at least one term of bigotry or ignorance specifically females are more likely to know?

Porn? I think a lot more males watch it than females.

Why aren’t there women specific terms for the romance or erotica that women overwhelmingly consume then is my confusion. Because it’s not like women don’t get off. They just have different mediums to consume erotic content.

I would assume that's the case because it's commonly used in pornography (see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shemale) and males statistically watch more pornography.

Why isn’t there a term overwhelmingly used in romance/erotica then, which is famously women-catered? And women consume a lot of romance/erotica.

Can you think of one?

I’m not a woman and I don’t consume romance/erotica so no. I’m only aware of how big romance is because I’m a writer, and it’s no secret romance authors far and away make the most money.

I'm not sure I fully get the question.

The landscape of romance novels might be getting different now, but from what I used to see, a lot of the older romance novels feature mainly standard heterosexual romance. So I'm not sure why there would be a term that's overwhelmingly used as there generally wouldn't be such a term?

But that’s my question: why wouldn’t there be?

This is very interesting!

Would love to see a similar list but weight by the ratio of men who don't know versus women who don't know aka words that known by 90% of males and 80% of females (or visa versa). This is very interesting but not that surprised that many people don't know boson or servo or checksum or technical words.

Does anyone else feel many of the "men's" works are just physics terms (boson, femtosecond, pizoelectric)? And maybe a second grouping around Japanese cultural cliches (Bushido, Katana)?

Is there a similar set in the women's words that isn't apparent to a male physics grad like me?

Would be interesting if this could be expended and linked to personality types based on their past communications. Marketing applications, and possibly diagnostic. Maybe you could predict someone falling into depression based on a change in their vocabulary for example.

How was checksum known by >50% of men? When would a non programmer come across this word?

Interesting that many people here know many of the words.

I knew 10 of the male ones and zero of the female...

I'm from New Zealand, it'd be interesting to do this same experiment in NZ / Aus to see what the percentages are.

I suspect that the average NZ vocabulary is quite low...

What does "knowing" a word mean? Is it just recognizing that the word is a valid word?

I am skeptical that 80% of men recognize that "boson" is a word, but only about 50% of women could put together "shemale" from context clues.

Higgs boson was pretty famous.

I call Bull... Non replicability on this one. Maybe half the guys have heard or seen femtosecond, but I don't believe if you polled a random sampling of men that they would know off the top of their head what its actual duration is.

Agreed. Same with checksum.

>For each vocabulary test, a random sample of 67 words and 33 nonwords was selected. For each letter string, participants had to indicate whether or not they knew the stimulus.

Nowhere in the study were they asked to define it.

Linguistic sexual dimorphism.

Many men on this thread seem surprised at just how "male" they seem to be. Perhaps tech-awareness has become a defining trait of maleness, just as a large musculature has become mostly redundant.

I guess that's an interesting way to point out that the domain most dominated by women over men is fashion and the domain most dominated by men over women is engineering (or porn in the case of "shemale"?)

Checks out, at least anecdotally. I recognized (and could define) every one of the "male" words, but I recognized only 6 of the "female" words, and could probably only define one or two of them.

Next: correlate with college admission test vocabulary, see how biased they are.

Wordle Words Known Better by Males Than Females, and Vice Versa

https://observablehq.com/@drsr/wordle-words

I'm really surprised "boson" did so well with women. Or, more precisely, that "boson" and "femtosecond" are so far apart. "Boson" seems far more obscure.

But the Higgs boson! Who doesn’t remember the good old Higgs boson?

Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7949183 (8 years ago)

Reminds me of Randall Munroe's hilarious report on his color survey, specifically the section on gender differences: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

It's a shame that dictionaries don't collect and include this kind of data, since a word is the set of people that will understand that specific definition if you use it.

This is arts & crafts nerd words vs sci/tech nerd words

Fascinating. I could explain, in detail, every single much-better-known-by-men word. I did not recognize a single better-known-by-female word, with the exception of doula.

There was probably some bias in the selection of the participants. I don't think 50 % of the average male population know "piezoelectricity".

I once lost first-place in a spelling bee with a word I'd never seen before (as a guy): "Leotard"

I spelled it exactly as it sounded: "Leatard" /eyeroll

I would love to see this for Wikipedia articles, but based on age, not gender. E.g. "This fact is known by 95% of people at age 21".

I didn't know all the male-leaning words tbh, but it's not hard to have an educated guess that "neodymium" is probably a chemical element, thermister is probably something in physics related to thermodynamics, that a teraflop is computer-related (at first I thought, terabyte + floppy disk?), etc.

Didn't know azimuth, aileron, or strafe but they're all cool, and I'm glad I learned.

I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.

I only learned about servos a couple years back in a maker-space YouTube channel.

> I'm surprised more people don't know who the yakuza are, but OK.

Before the '80s, practically nobody outside Japan knew what the Yakuza was. Business development over that decade popularized its existence, so (American) writers picked it up, but after the cyberpunk wave (which abused it), it has largely fallen from favour as a narrative device outside Japan. Ironically, this mirrors somewhat the power the Yakuza can actually wield nowadays: after the Lost Decade of Japanese stagflation, and the rise of Eastern-European gangs (the real bosses of the globalized criminal network, at least in terms of raw "wetwork"), the Yakuza was significantly diminished.

Interesting. Yeah, I grew up in the 90s, so in addition to tamagotchi and pokemon, I became aware at some point about the Japanese mob.

As a tech/sci-fi nerd and avid crafter, I accept your collective awe at my knowledge of the majority of these words

The fact that "shemale" is the most well-known male word really speaks to the sexual insecurity of males

How's that? Sure it's a slur and not as proper as "woman with a penis", but the fact that men are looking at porn of trans women, hey at least they think we're hot, right?

Heh, yeah, I don't like the slur aspect, but regular straight dudes (especially if they have even a slight inclination towards nonstraight) seem tremendously preoccupied with their masculinity or lack thereof. I thought it was a sign of that and not necessarily interest, but interest is fine!

Not knowing those upper words and knowing these lower words is actually a badge of honor ;)

Fascinating, in the UK/US one I was 10 vs 9, here it's 5 vs 19, as a non-native speaker.

Very useful if you ever participate in a Turing Test (original version, ie the imitation game).

> verbena

Ha ha luckily I just played Witcher 3

Does teraflop really count as a "word" if it has an acronym as part of it?

Why not?

Sure. "Laser" is a word too, and it's all acronym.

Laser, sonar, radar. Many, if not most, acronyms become words on their own at some point in English, especially if they enter the popular lexicon (leave their initial niche).

I'm more bothered by the omission of "s". The S in teraflops is not plural, it's part of the acronym.

Your computer has 1 teraflop performance? One trillion floating point operations per _what_, then?

Can someone help the layman here? I don't understand how to read that graph.

It's surprising that damask is so far below katana for males.

All the words on the female side seem to be fake words (except for two) ?

I take it you're a roughly-average male?

kind of weird and offensive to put a transgender slur on here.

No wonder I can hardly understand my wife… and vice-versa.

Sooo... I'm 42nd percentile on word knowledge I guess.

Did they really put "shemale" on the list?

What's so weird about female tamales?

It's one of those words that was applied to people who had no real say in it, and some people are taking a bit to catch up now that trans and intersex people have an actual voice. There's no Grand Queer Consortium deciding it, so you'll find people who don't care, but it's broadly Not Okay now.

Along similar lines: names of colours, by gender:

https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

"I weep for my gender."

What does knowing all of them say about me? O_o

Guess you're non-binary lol

seems like some sampling bias. you're telling me 80% of men in the U.S. know's what a `parsec` is? seems high

Is it possible to see a larger list?

Check out ESM 2 from the study, which includes all 60k words. The Male vs Female prevalence is the third sheet in the xlsx.

https://static-content.springer.com/esm/art%3A10.3758%2Fs134...

Top 50 female:

peplum tulle chiffon chignon bandeau garland freesia chenille kohl tarragon taupe cohosh bodice taffeta primrose trimester verbena doula murderess ruche tresses amorous boucle peony damask antagonistic sarong stridor zoological beau espadrille mimosa skittles guacamole pessary shirtdress underwire caddy chambray colicky grosgrain jacquard progesterone wallflower bangle bin clairvoyance fibroid menopausal whipstitch

Top 50 male:

catacomb strafe parsec depressurize shemale bushido bailout hafnium numeral contextualize teraflop neodymium femtosecond tomahawk piezoelectricity paladin kevlar yakuza neurotoxic moonlit crosshair afterburner gigabit trailblazer randomization katana howitzer thermistor enabler codec claymore airstrike derby banshee submersible mach flaccidness checksum boson aileron unplayable preciously encyclopedic siege gauss gaijin degauss unranked servo reverb

this is clearly the result of societal programming. i propose that we eliminate all of these words from the dictionaries. we dont need any of these words anyway.

Mind... blown!

N = 388

Strange. All the male words are perfectly commonplace, and all the female ones appear to be completely made up.

Let me guess...

Such dataset could be used as a gender captcha.

There's a comic strip I saw once about how to detect people pretending to be girls on online chats. Ask them "what do you think of [I can't remember the word]?" and if they go "Huh?" you know they're pretending to be a girl. The word was a word that meant decoration on windows, but I can't remember what it is...

This is brilliant. Like that time the psychiatrist showed me endless silhouettes of my parents fighting, and kept asking me, "What do you see here?"

At first I thought “all the female words must be in some other language”.

It does seem like the female words are more obviously foreign (specifically French) whereas the male words tend towards being more technical.

I'm seeing Greek, Latin, Japanese, German, and Danish just skimming the "male words", and plenty of the "female words" have been used in English for ages. I think that's more a familiarity effect.

Of course the roots of English include Greek and Latin and German, but words like femtosecond or piezoelectricity or teraflop or milliamp are technical terms, not old but standard words imported from another language. Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.

    Maybe "femtosecond" was used by Danish scientists in the 1800's or something, but it's definitely not a word that was common in another language and then imported into English.

Worth noting that by the percentages here fewer than 50% of males surveyed were familiar with it.

"Chambray", "chignon", "bandeau" etc. are also standard technical words imported from another language.

The female words are technical too, just in a different field to the one you are in.

That’s fair. I guess I meant “technical” in the sense of being associated with math/science/engineering.

Thanks, that cheered me up this morning! :)

Same for me. What a coincidence!

I had the same experience. Googling them, I see the following categories:

- (Women's) clothing and cosmetics (peplum, bandeau, kohl, espadrille, whipstitch)

- Hair style (chignon)

- Fabrics and weaving (ruche, bouclé, chenille, voile, sateen, jacquard, damask, chambray)

- Women's health (pessary, doula)

- Flowers (Freesia, Verbena)

Interestingly, half of these words aren't even in Firefox's dictionary it seems. Even with "English (United States, large)" some words are underlined with red squiggles.

Most excessively male-recognised words seem to come from technical fields or science, or Japanese culture, weirdly enough. The only explanation I can give for most men seemingly knowing "shemale" is porn.

My conclusion for this data: men tend to know fewer words relating to clothes and aesthetics, women tend to know fewer words relating to science and Japanese culture. As the recognition for "female" words is much lower than that of the "male" words, I'd say that this is because of a lack of men with knowledge about clothes.

Almost nothing is in the Firefox dictionary, it’s a serious problem with the browser: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=499593

Discoverable, Rebecca, amongst, captcha, jokester - just to give a few examples of normal words that Firefox doesn’t know.

Tell me you're male without telling me you're male.

Now I need to find my moist, used, taffeta katana.

I knew almost all of the "feee-male" words, though, despite being cis-male, because of reading historical fiction that's not military wankery.

> because of reading historical fiction that's not military wankery.

wondering what the gender breakdown is on that category?

I don't know how much flak I will get for making a comment like this, but feel it's important to point out the data is obviously biased for (or at least the article doesn't specifically call out):

1. Western society's influence 2. Cultural background influence 3. Sex assigned at birth influence

> 3. Sex assigned at birth influence

I'm not on-board with appropriating literature on DSDs, where sex was to some extent "assigned" in cases of ambiguity.

It's an appropriation that serves a political viewpoint that sex as an internal feeling, rather than a reality that is recorded; not assigned.

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