CHAT: gender of conlangers

Baba wrote:
>
> --- On Fri, 25 Sep 1998 14:20:40 -0300  Pablo Flores wrote
<snipped Baba's information on "brain sex", in response to Pablo's
statements>
>
> <throw cat among pigeons: await result>
>
Thanks so much, Baba. This is exactly the kind of information I wanted
to cite, but didn't really know where to start looking. It's what I was
trying to get at when I said:

> ... remind everyone that whereas perhaps there is a
> difference in the mean tendencies between the genders, there is also
> usually much more difference *within* each gender than there is
> between them.
This is also what I was trying to point out when I mentioned that even
though women, in general, may have the more language-oriented brains,
that our famous writers and orators are almost all men (until recently).
The point being that yes, physiological tendencies exist in our brain
structures, but that the cultural environment plays such an incredibly
important role in which tendencies are ever realized in any particular
individual.

Someone else mentioned the idea that sometimes a person needs to be
shown a possibility before they can follow up on it. They cited some
woman who became a minister only after her own congregation minister
mentioned it as a possibility. Prior to that, it apparently had just not
entered her mind. My history in conlanging is similar. Unlike Sally, I
only began conlanging as an adult. I was introduced to Tolkein's and
Barker's work (high school and college), and was fascinated. But even
though I had a fair grounding in foreign language (5 years of German in
public school; a lot for an American of that age) I still didn't have
the knowledge for it to occur to me that it would be possible for *me*
to do it, or that I'd find it fun. During graduate school, fate took me
into the Linguistics department (I was pursuing Artificial Intelligence
in CS at the time). Around that same period, I had taken over ownership
of a role-playing game campaign which my friends and I had begun in
college. Thanks to my linguistics classes, suddenly I had the tools, and
thanks to the game, suddenly I had a setting to play off of. I've been
conlanging ever since, even though that campaign, as a game, is long
over and I'm not currently pursuing formal study or work in AI.

My point, after this ramble, is that I never exhibited stellar ability
with language as a child. Good reader, yes, but not the assumed
female-related language facility. It was purely aspects of experience
and education which allowed me to connect with this fascinating pastime,
education which I couldn't have dreamed of if I had been living, say,
even fifty years earlier.

What I'd really like to see (and who knows how long I'll have to wait),
is what the distribution of activity tendencies between genders turns
out to be once we have a base of a few generations where the educational
opportunities are *truly* equal.

Laurie
---
Laurie Gerholz
milo@winternet.com
http://www.winternet.com/~milo