4 ms·

Jesus Christ on a cracker: why the hell is she described as a "school girl"? That designates an elementary or pre-teen woman, not someone 17 years old.

abalone 8y ago
Agreed, while the HN link is in some ways more descriptive than the literal title, it’s doubtful that a male 17 year old would be described as a diminutive “schoolboy” or even gender referenced at all. @dang suggest we swap “school girl” for “high school student”?
elliotec 8y ago
In the US it generally refers to people under college age.
dang 8y ago
The submitter maybe shouldn't have rewritten the title ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). But there's another factor: HN is highly international (at least 50% outside the US), and often commenters interpret things as offensive violations of cultural norms when the other person's intention (edit: and also their meaning) was benign. I hope I can say without violating any confidence that it was probably a case of that here. Consider that if you lead with "Jesus Christ on a cracker", you might be assuming something false about who you're talking to, and unfortunately adding poison into the system. Edit: anyone who's interested can read the long discussion below, but I should note here that in the end we replaced the title with something more neutral. That's what we usually do when people have complaints about a title. (Submitted title was "A school girl became the first person to fold a paper in half 12 times".)
- abalone 8y ago
  Agreed about the JC comment but as for the title, sexist biases in other cultures shouldn’t be accepted here just because the sexism is well-intentioned, which it often is. Likely the young woman was gender referenced to emphasize the “surprising, unexpected” outcome. Bottom line high school males would more likely be described as “budding mathematicians” or simply “students“ than “schoolboys” and that is a double standard.
  - dang 8y ago
    > sexist biases in other cultures > sexism > Likely You're assuming that you know that "school girl/boy" is a demeaning phrase everywhere in the world. Are you sure? I doubt you should be. For us, "school girl/boy" is archaic and sounds patronizing, but in other places it may simply mean student. In many languages "school girl/boy" is the standard term for "student, but not yet in university", while "student" is used only for university students. If that was the meaning here, the submitter probably used the word to highlight that Britney Crystal Gallivan accomplished what she did while still in school. Imagine if that were so, and then they meet with a nasty rebuke and accusations of sexism. Does that help make HN the welcoming place we want it to be? How would you feel in that position? If you look upthread to that aggressive snapback response, it flat-out declares "That designates an elementary or pre-teen woman, not someone 17 years old." That is almost certainly wrong. Had the author added "Where I come from", then it would be true—and it would also be clear why they were wrong to be aggressive, rather than inquisitive, about the word. Similarly, your comment says "high school males would more likely be described as XYZ...and that is a double standard". That's even more relative to your particular language community, which I'm guessing the submitter does not belong to. Most likely, crossed language wires created an insult where there wasn't one. At a minimum, prabhupant deserved the benefit of the doubt from you guys—and the site guidelines require that you give it (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Alas, how difficult it is in practice to actually do. Why dwell on this? Because conflict on HN frequently arises between people who don't realize how they're talking across cultural/national divides. On the internet, people assume the other person belongs to the same group as they do, which makes it easy to interpret others as assholes when they say X—where X is outrageous on my side of the divide. But it's a mistake to assume a universal meaning. A lot of this misunderstanding comes, ironically, from how well HN users all over the world have mastered English. In person, once we hear an accent or see differences, interpretation recalibrates. But on HN, where that data isn't present, we default to assuming that the other person is not only a native speaker, but lives in the same region as we do. Then we get mad because they sound like an asshole of our tribe, rather than a decent person from another.
    - abalone 8y ago
scarejunba 8y ago
The suction cup kid was called a schoolboy too and he was some 16 or something. This is really not a big deal.
DoreenMichele 8y ago
Women and women's rights advocates find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Not putting gender in the title fails to celebrate female accomplishments. The student will be assumed male. Putting it in the title inevitably leads to some kind of criticism, often an extremely and unnecessarily ugly criticism. And it tends to not matter how one frames it when trying to signal pride in female accomplishment. Someone is bound to have an issue with it. People will debate endlessly whether "female" or "woman" is the worst, most offensive term. Or people will be mad that gender was signaled at all and decry it as "reverse sexism." Progress in such issues would go better if people would stop having a cow about gender signaling in titles and stop being agressively ugly about it never being perfect enough.
- belorn 8y ago
  Swedish national news has a initiative where gender is avoided in articles unless it is directly relevant. The goal is to avoid creating a exaggerated view of gendered roles. If 80% of the police is men and a person see two stories which both include male police, a reader might conclude that all police is 100% male. If one out of five articles have a female police you only reach the subset of readers that happen to catch those articles. With no gender you reach all your audience. I would very much like to see a similar policy on HN. Attaching gender to articles inhibit progress. The fastest progress is the one that goes unnoticed and simply is.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    I don't know what the best approach is. I would like to think that downplaying gender helps, but minorities find it hard to find good role models, people "like them" that they can identify with, etc. Actively downplaying gender and officially excluding gender signaling in headlines seems to make it all the harder for women to find things they can relate to. I honestly don't know what the best path forward is. I do know that excess criticism of minority signals often actively shits all over expressions of pride and attempts to connect while nominally pretending to be righteous indignation on the part of mistreated underdogs.

abalone 8y ago

Agreed, while the HN link is in some ways more descriptive than the literal title, it’s doubtful that a male 17 year old would be described as a diminutive “schoolboy” or even gender referenced at all. @dang suggest we swap “school girl” for “high school student”?

elliotec 8y ago

In the US it generally refers to people under college age.

dang 8y ago

The submitter maybe shouldn't have rewritten the title ("Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). But there's another factor: HN is highly international (at least 50% outside the US), and often commenters interpret things as offensive violations of cultural norms when the other person's intention (edit: and also their meaning) was benign. I hope I can say without violating any confidence that it was probably a case of that here. Consider that if you lead with "Jesus Christ on a cracker", you might be assuming something false about who you're talking to, and unfortunately adding poison into the system. Edit: anyone who's interested can read the long discussion below, but I should note here that in the end we replaced the title with something more neutral. That's what we usually do when people have complaints about a title. (Submitted title was "A school girl became the first person to fold a paper in half 12 times".)

abalone 8y ago
Agreed about the JC comment but as for the title, sexist biases in other cultures shouldn’t be accepted here just because the sexism is well-intentioned, which it often is. Likely the young woman was gender referenced to emphasize the “surprising, unexpected” outcome. Bottom line high school males would more likely be described as “budding mathematicians” or simply “students“ than “schoolboys” and that is a double standard.
- dang 8y ago
  > sexist biases in other cultures > sexism > Likely You're assuming that you know that "school girl/boy" is a demeaning phrase everywhere in the world. Are you sure? I doubt you should be. For us, "school girl/boy" is archaic and sounds patronizing, but in other places it may simply mean student. In many languages "school girl/boy" is the standard term for "student, but not yet in university", while "student" is used only for university students. If that was the meaning here, the submitter probably used the word to highlight that Britney Crystal Gallivan accomplished what she did while still in school. Imagine if that were so, and then they meet with a nasty rebuke and accusations of sexism. Does that help make HN the welcoming place we want it to be? How would you feel in that position? If you look upthread to that aggressive snapback response, it flat-out declares "That designates an elementary or pre-teen woman, not someone 17 years old." That is almost certainly wrong. Had the author added "Where I come from", then it would be true—and it would also be clear why they were wrong to be aggressive, rather than inquisitive, about the word. Similarly, your comment says "high school males would more likely be described as XYZ...and that is a double standard". That's even more relative to your particular language community, which I'm guessing the submitter does not belong to. Most likely, crossed language wires created an insult where there wasn't one. At a minimum, prabhupant deserved the benefit of the doubt from you guys—and the site guidelines require that you give it (please see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html). Alas, how difficult it is in practice to actually do. Why dwell on this? Because conflict on HN frequently arises between people who don't realize how they're talking across cultural/national divides. On the internet, people assume the other person belongs to the same group as they do, which makes it easy to interpret others as assholes when they say X—where X is outrageous on my side of the divide. But it's a mistake to assume a universal meaning. A lot of this misunderstanding comes, ironically, from how well HN users all over the world have mastered English. In person, once we hear an accent or see differences, interpretation recalibrates. But on HN, where that data isn't present, we default to assuming that the other person is not only a native speaker, but lives in the same region as we do. Then we get mad because they sound like an asshole of our tribe, rather than a decent person from another.
  - abalone 8y ago

scarejunba 8y ago

The suction cup kid was called a schoolboy too and he was some 16 or something. This is really not a big deal.

DoreenMichele 8y ago

Women and women's rights advocates find themselves in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" situation. Not putting gender in the title fails to celebrate female accomplishments. The student will be assumed male. Putting it in the title inevitably leads to some kind of criticism, often an extremely and unnecessarily ugly criticism. And it tends to not matter how one frames it when trying to signal pride in female accomplishment. Someone is bound to have an issue with it. People will debate endlessly whether "female" or "woman" is the worst, most offensive term. Or people will be mad that gender was signaled at all and decry it as "reverse sexism." Progress in such issues would go better if people would stop having a cow about gender signaling in titles and stop being agressively ugly about it never being perfect enough.

belorn 8y ago
Swedish national news has a initiative where gender is avoided in articles unless it is directly relevant. The goal is to avoid creating a exaggerated view of gendered roles. If 80% of the police is men and a person see two stories which both include male police, a reader might conclude that all police is 100% male. If one out of five articles have a female police you only reach the subset of readers that happen to catch those articles. With no gender you reach all your audience. I would very much like to see a similar policy on HN. Attaching gender to articles inhibit progress. The fastest progress is the one that goes unnoticed and simply is.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  I don't know what the best approach is. I would like to think that downplaying gender helps, but minorities find it hard to find good role models, people "like them" that they can identify with, etc. Actively downplaying gender and officially excluding gender signaling in headlines seems to make it all the harder for women to find things they can relate to. I honestly don't know what the best path forward is. I do know that excess criticism of minority signals often actively shits all over expressions of pride and attempts to connect while nominally pretending to be righteous indignation on the part of mistreated underdogs.