You made a foolish assumption. Not everyone does that, or even cares in the slightest what a users gender/age/cultural background/disability/whatever is.
All you have done is reveal your own past personal prejudice. Congratulations on getting over that.
So you read about someone's experience proving otherwise (I have had similar experiences on IRC, getting treated shitty for being a woman) and you stated something else in an authoritarian fashion, without feeling the slightest need to prove your point. How... interesting.
No requirement exists to give your gender or a name that may reveal a gender. That, by any definition, is 'gender neutral'.
If someone makes assumptions about other people it's their own issue, it has nothing to do with what is essentially an anonymous medium. I really didn't think it needed 'proving'.
> That, by any definition, is 'gender neutral'.
No, because women receive shit and most users are considered male by default.
> Saying his personal experience proves anything about IRC as a medium is a stretch.
His experiences are not the only ones that exist. At least a couple female IRC users I know carefully chose handles that do not reveal their gender, because they wanted to spare themselves all the negative comments they received before the handle change.
The thing I always loved about IRC was that even when I was 12 years old, people took me seriously, not because I was male, or white, or an adult, but because I was thoughtful and intelligent - age in this case being the key differentiating factor.
Disgusting sexist people exist. If you tell them your gender they may well attack you for it, because they are terrible people. What are we debating here? The only assertion I've made is that IRC is inherently gender neutral by definition.
It's folly to think that you are free of prejudice with the only basis that you don't consciously hold these prejudices, because we (humanity, science) know for a fact that biases are much more deeply ingrained in most of us.
This is particularly hard for our demographic (programmers et al) to hear, because we consider ourselves rational. We like to think that we do things because we have thought them through. But all evidence points to the fact that we are just as susceptible to biases and prejudice as everyone else. Indeed, nobody seems to be free of it, but there is a silver lining: with an analytical approach, it is possible to examine biases and become aware of them, and eventually work through them.
Why would a person even give a microseconds thought on whether or not I was white, black, male, female, whatever, and even if they do -- why is it _my_ responsibility as person putting the content out there to be one or the other?
It's not.
You're right one one point - programmers do consider themselves to be rational. IRC is one place where biases simply don't exist by definition, because why would they? Nothing defining anything exists unless you explicitly want it to.
I find it extremely irking that you keep trying to insinuate that literally every person on IRC thinks of each other as a 'white male' like you describe. This reveals a problem, not systemic, but in yourself.
I believe his point is he realized that technology alone does not obviate sociological issues, after being confronted with his own bias in an unanticipated way.