Re: "if that makes any difference"

Sally wrote:
>Another question I didn't ask, for obvious reasons, was why there are
so
>few
>women participating on CONLANG (which is why I refer exclusively to
"gay
>men").  There used to be more, but they were still definitely in the
>minority.  This was another great unanswerable, like why are there
>statistically fewer female computer programmers or mathematicians.  Any
>attempt at answering it threatens to fall into essentialism, if not the
>usual boring explanations: women aren't trained in early years to
pursue
>these professions, etc.  Blah.  How is it we're not reaching out to
women,
>or women to the list?
	Perhaps it is arguable that women were not trained in the early
years to explain the dearth of them in computer programming (etc), but I
see less reason to extend that to belonging to a conlang list, except
for postulating that because the lack of early training, there are less
women on the internet (especially older ones, and the young ones that
are on don't know what Listserv is).
	I saw *a lot* of males in their teens on that survey, and from
my own experience, know that there are millions of females the same age
that grew up with access to a personal computer, and are certainly on
them everyday, from what I've learned from Livejournal statistics.
	Just a thought: lists were around relatively early, when most of
the people online were male computer geeks. I wonder how male-dominated
the conlang community is in female-dominated Livejournal.

--Tsemol