Re: Welcome Christine! And the "woman" issue. WAS: lunatic survey

I think I'll chime in on this topic, but I'm not sure what to quote...
Here's
a start:

Sally wrote:
<<
Once I opined, and I may have been wrong, that women on average are
trained
in American (and perhaps European) society to be practical minded, and
that
there is something inherently "uncool" in exposing excessive
enthusiasm, or
involving themselves in pursuits that don't immediately yield some kind
of
profitable endeavor--such as competing to get into college, graduate
school,
or at the very least, being "taken seriously as a professional."  These
are
potent concerns for women these days.
 >>

Umm...these days?  I thought the whole trend since the late 80's was
that
in high school, women dominated honors and AP classes (that was
certainly
the case in my school), and it's certainly the case that women outnumber
men in at least some universities (e.g., the entire UC system--the
statistics
came out just last month).  In linguistics classes up at Berkeley, women
outnumbered men by far, and I've noticed the same trend here at UCSD.
But of those people, you'd be more likely to find a closet conlanger or
conlang sympathizer amongst men than women.  In fact, of the people
up at Berkeley that knew about me conlanging, it was always the women
who'd say things like, "Why would you waste your time doing something
so stupid?"

You know who would be an interesting study?  My girlfriend.  She's my
age, and also majored in linguistics at Berkeley (as well as
anthropology),
and she's here at UCSD as a linguistics graduate student.  She DEVOURS
fantasy and sci-fi novels--literally.  She can read three 500 page
books in
a day--I've seen her do it (and here I am still reading The Divine
Comedy
which I've been working on since high school...  Man, if I had her
skills...!).
She loves fantasy/sci-fi movies and shows, and engages in various
hobbies
(dollhouses, needlepoint, etc.).  And, I discovered, she, with her a
couple
of her siblings, used to conculture avidly as kids.  That is, they'd
create
imaginary societies, with imaginary people and imaginary clothes and
maps and governments.  But language?  Absolutely not.  In fact--and
this is something really interesting--she was introduced to language
creation in elementary school.  One of her elementary school teachers
came up with a lesson where the class broke into groups and the groups
each tried to invent their own language, trying to figure out what was
important.  And--this is kicker--she was really good at it!  Her group
was the only one that passed the "test" at the end: to see if certain
things could be translated.  All the groups were spending time thinking
about "Should we have the letter 'y'?", and "What should the color of
our flag be?", but my girlfriend (Erin is her name) knew that what they
needed was basic vocabulary and combinatory rules, and so they really
did well, and were the only ones to do well.

[I need a new paragraph; that's too much text.]

Anyway, so, add *all* of this up, plus the fact that she has a boyfriend
who's a language enthusiast and avid conlanger, and try to square the
fact that conlanging, as such, doesn't interest her in the slightest.
She's
more interested in sports, for which she has little or no interest.  She
can't be bothered even to discuss it, or hear about it.  Outside of the
one project at school, she's never taken it up on her own.  I've asked
her why before, and sometimes she says she doesn't see the point;
other times she's said it would be too hard; other times she's said
she has other things she wants to be doing with her free time.  And
that's fine, of course.  I'm just personally baffled at how someone
with her background could not even be the slightest bit interested
in conlanging.

So, sorry for that digression, but it seemed relevant.  (Oh, another
interesting factoid: For how much she likes fantasy, she despises
Tolkien.)

Back to the point about women and conlanging.  If conlanging is
something that's commonly seen as a "nerd" activity, that could be
part of the answer.  If you ask me to define a prototypical nerd,
geek, whatever, I'll list a bunch of traits, and will *undoubtedly*
picture someone who's male.  Star Trek, Star Wars, fantasy--the
whole bit.  For every trait I can come up with, I know women
who can be associated with them.  However, I picture the prototypical
Trekkie, video game junkie, model train builder, etc., to be male.
Again, it's not a true generalization, but it's a generalization that
I have.  So it might be the case that the prototypical "nerd" things
have male associations, and that might be why there appear to
be more male than female conlangers.  That's just a guess based
on nothing but mere conjecture, but I thought I'd throw it out
there.

-David

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