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This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know

This shouldn’t surprise you. Most people can infer gender from visual appearance alone with well over 99.99% accuracy without being explicitly told. If you know their name and other gendered indicators, it would be a marked anomaly NOT to know their gender.

signalsmith 7y ago
I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story. So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.
- weberc2 7y ago
  I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).
- GhostVII 7y ago
  But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.
  - geofft 7y ago
    That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team." Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.
geofft 7y ago
I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races. It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be. (It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)
- ZeroGravitas 7y ago
  You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm... In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit. My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.
- iguy 7y ago
  Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere. Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.

signalsmith 7y ago

I can also guess people's height to within an inch or two, but I can still have an abstract conversation about a friend-of-a-friend I've never met, without expecting to be (constantly!) told how tall they are unless it's relevant to the story. So in terms of the order we learn things about people we've never met (when it's not directly relevant), we expect gender much earlier than many other attributes. It mostly reflects our values as a society, as language often does, but that's kind of my point.

weberc2 7y ago
I misunderstood your point. I thought you found it remarkable that we expected to be able to discern gender quite quickly. In any case, I don’t know how much our gendered language indicates our values as a society, probably that gender is just information-dense (lots of behavior correlates strongly with gender) such that many languages evolved gender as a utility (and indeed English actually lost much of its grammatical gender though probably not because the density of information was lower in English-speaking societies, but rather due to massive influxes of non-native speakers which had a broader simplifying effect on the language).
GhostVII 7y ago
But gender has a much more significant affect on how someone acts than their height, and significantly affects what kind of relationship you could have with that person.
- geofft 7y ago
  That makes it relevant for stories like "I met him at a bar and we shared a few drinks," but not "I sold her a cup of coffee this morning" or "She's interviewing for our team." Gender is also kind of a useless differentiator in many contexts because of the way that gender correlates with behavior: if there's a group of mothers or Catholic priests or even schoolteachers or venture capitalists, I'm much more likely to find pronouns for short/tall useful than for male/female in communicating about specific members of that group.

geofft 7y ago

I can also infer race from visual appearance with similar accuracy, but if I say "Can you hand this to that black person" would be super weird and quite likely objectionable, even if I was correct that the person was black. And nobody would want abbreviated pronouns on race - "I talked to whim and whe said to talk to blim" just seems sort of ... overly concerned with people's races. It's a linguistic quirk of English that "Can you hand this to [that female person]" is accepted and natural. On first principles it shouldn't be. (It is interesting IMO that Japanese has a pronoun for "she," and it's a compound word that literally translates as "that woman." It only developed as a pronoun in the last century or so, from the influence of Weatern works which had he/she or equivalent pronouns.)

ZeroGravitas 7y ago
You reminded me of Douglas Hofstadter's "A Person Paper on Purity in Language" https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~evans/cs655/readings/purity.htm... In which he pretends to be from a parallel dimension where you don't use he and she (for male and female) but whe and ble (for white and black) to highlight the absurdity of language making gender explicit. My daughter is very young and currently refers to everyone, including Disney princesses as he/him which sounds totally weird to me, but I guess it is one option for phasing the distinction out.
- geofft 7y ago
  Thank you - I hadn't seen that before, and this is basically how I feel about having to attach a gender to anyone I refer to in the third person.
iguy 7y ago
Here's the first-principles argument: Most people grow up and learn the language in a family group, which has a mix of ages and of sexes. Saying "he" vs "she" here usually cuts the number of people you could be talking about in half, it's very informative, one bit! It will often let you omit the name, or shorten the sentence elsewhere. Whereas always marking what continent you're all living on, or what race you all are, usually doesn't convey any information. So it seems entirely unsurprising that languages tend not to build this in. Many do build in markers for what species, because again this was useful information, since most of our ancestors spent a long time farming.