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Comment by forktheif | Hacker News Reader

I'm guessing that a lot of the difficulty comes from the fact he's creating an OS for a PC, which is a pretty quirky and inconsistent architecture.

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The blog author is not a 'he' but a 'she.' Her name is mentioned through the article.

And I'm guessing that the difficulty comes from the fact that she's building a freaking operating system from scratch... ;)

Is the gender of said author supposed to be curious or worthy of attention? I'm not intending to be impolite, but this is the third time in several days that HN posters have brusquely corrected a gender pronoun in relation to a submission of nondescript importance.

It's quite disrespectful to call someone a 'he' when they are obviously a 'she.' This is only vaguely related to the recent discussion about 'they' for people of indeterminate gender.

It's also quite jarring to read; I was confused if the OP was speaking of someone else. People often point out grammar or factual mistakes, I see your parent as doing no different.

I was under the impression that banal grammar corrections are frowned upon here on HN, because they do nothing to further the topic or encourage interesting discussion. It's one of the reasons why Reddit is so tedious.

They point is not so much a correction of grammar, but a correction of the wrong implicit assumption that a person who writes about osdev has to be male. Its no drama if it happens once, but as said in this thread it happened several times in the last few days. And if it happens that often it effectively makes women in this field invisible, especially as role models for the next generation(s).

EDIT: And it goes a bit further. The sole reason why we are having this discussion is because the author explicitly used a female name and her writings still got perceived as those of a male author. If there no name or just a generic nick, most people in here - myself probably included - would have assumed its a male by default.

Yeah, I mean, I downvote someone if they say "lol grammer stfu", but if it's part of a larger post, I don't think it's a bad thing.

I guess I see a blatant mis-gendering as not 'banal.'

It's not a grammar correction, but a factual one, as if someone were misquoting the original article.

>Is the gender of said author supposed to be curious or worthy of attention?

It shouldn't be. There are two things going on here:

* Perception of our industry as all-male biases women against joining

* Default use of 'He' exacerbates this by unsubtly signalling that our community is all-male

So why flag female hackers?

* To try to combat the perception of us being an all-male community (we're not)

* To signal to women and men that both genders can operate comfortably in this environment

Why do we want more women hackers?

* We are ignoring more than 50% of the programming talent in the world

A (female) instructor in charge of the tutorial of the Foundations of Computer Science lecture (forprospective Computer Scientists) was also responsible for the tutorials for prospective media scholars of Foundations of Computer Science (they had to hear the same lecture, but had easier tutorials and an easier exam about it).

When in the tutorial by accident she called a woman by "he", she told that in doubt in the tutorial for Computer Scientists she calls people by "he" and in the tutorial for media scholars by "she", since because of the gender ratios of these courses of studies this behaviour maximizes her likelihood to be correct.

Misgendering people is disrespectful to them, and particularly so when a woman is being misgendered as a man because she is writing about something technical.

> HN posters have brusquely corrected a gender pronoun

I'm confused by your characterization. Why do you think it is brusque?

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