8 ms·

Very nice, I'm missing the city names though :) Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our po

Very nice, I'm missing the city names though :) Crazy how little women there are, it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed!

macintux 4y ago
You can toggle between people and location names on the left.
downboots 4y ago
> it's like we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Well, most all had a mom...
- teekert 4y ago
  And sisters and daughters... But somehow they never had the same opportunities to get on this "Famous People" list. Last week I told my Daughter she can be a knight (although granted she usually wants to be a princess), and I felt weird and then I felt extra weird.
  - downboots 4y ago
    I think we agree a lot of good work goes unrecognized. Just pointing out no one works truly alone. Off topic: I imagine parenting must feel extra weird. :)
  - idkwhoiam 4y ago
    > she can be a knight She cannot unless you mean cosplay.
    - downboots 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc
      - tokai 4y ago
        She was never knighted.
Broken_Hippo 4y ago
There is an option in the top left that allows you to show city names. Unfortunately, you cannot see the city names and the people names at the same time.
telesilla 4y ago
You can help: https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imbalance-heres-how-to-do-it/ https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imb... https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/ https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/ There must be other initiatives if others have links to share in this thread.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jmfayard 4y ago
Gender Content bias is a systemic thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
Crazy how people think we have been only ignoring 50% of our potential when we were ignoring like 95%.
- hackernewds 4y ago
  I don't understand
  - teekert 4y ago
    I’d guess the 5% is some form of privileged elite. I see that.
    - input_sh 4y ago
      To quote Stephen Jay Gould: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
      - eevilspock 4y ago
        But without the enticement of membership in the elite, with a greater share of society's wealth, power and privileges, no one would bother working hard to become doctors, lawyers, software developers and CEOs. We need a stratified society to have all these things the modern world gives us. It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work. It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business. Capitalism depends on inequality, and we depend on capitalism. This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.
        marosgrego 4y ago
        What? One become a scientist because they are interested in things, or a doctor because they want to help people.
j7ake 4y ago
They weren’t ignored. For most of recorded history the basic unit was the family. The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs. It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control. The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings. The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  - j7ake 4y ago
    The life of women in the upper class were objectively better than the male serfs. The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender. It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      Nobody is arguing that being rich doesn't entail privelege. So why are you pointing that out? What purpose does it serve other than to distract from the original statement? To that point I'll not get distracted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace Did you know that the world's first programmer was a woman? She published the first algorithm for the Analytical Engine.
      - ehnto 4y ago
        I think Ada Lovelace is actually the perfect example of what the OP is talking about. There are fewer famous women in history because women were given less opportunity to excel (and sometimes had achievements they did make stifled or their contribution hidden). Ada Lovelace was both an extraordinary person, and in a very privileged position. Had she just been extraordinary, she wouldn't have had the tools to leverage her abilities. Her pedigree and circumstances allowed her access to the private education and social circle that allowed her to apply her abilities and excel. The issue is that so fewer women were ever given the opportunity to excel, and that still remains the case! I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...
wisty 4y ago
Maybe society doesn't have high enough expectations of women.
- eevilspock 4y ago
  Or maybe men don't have high expectations of women, or because they benefit from women having a subservient position, aren't very inclined to change society.
arethuza 4y ago
I went looking to see who the entry was for the nearest town to where I live expecting it to be Mary Somerville and was rather disappointed to find it was some chap I'd never heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville Worth noting: "In 1834 she became the first person to be described in print as a 'scientist'"
- jefftk 4y ago
  That's what the term was coined for; the older term was "man of science"
systemz 4y ago
You can enable city names in left upper corner with "Show real place names" option
ok123456 4y ago
There's a radio button to show the city/country names instead on the left hand side.
globular-toast 4y ago
Current estimates are that around 100 billion people have ever lived. So that's a lot more than 50% that have been "ignored". It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists. This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed! I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer. It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life. I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well. And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women. If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.
jedberg 4y ago
Look in areas that were settled more recently, like the US west coast, and you'll find more women. But definitely not 50%.
inglor_cz 4y ago
If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD. Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.

macintux 4y ago

You can toggle between people and location names on the left.

downboots 4y ago

> it's like we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Well, most all had a mom...

teekert 4y ago
And sisters and daughters... But somehow they never had the same opportunities to get on this "Famous People" list. Last week I told my Daughter she can be a knight (although granted she usually wants to be a princess), and I felt weird and then I felt extra weird.
- downboots 4y ago
  I think we agree a lot of good work goes unrecognized. Just pointing out no one works truly alone. Off topic: I imagine parenting must feel extra weird. :)
- idkwhoiam 4y ago
  > she can be a knight She cannot unless you mean cosplay.
  - downboots 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joan_of_Arc
    - tokai 4y ago
      She was never knighted.

Broken_Hippo 4y ago

There is an option in the top left that allows you to show city names. Unfortunately, you cannot see the city names and the people names at the same time.

telesilla 4y ago

You can help: https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imbalance-heres-how-to-do-it/ https://ideas.ted.com/you-can-help-fix-wikipedias-gender-imb... https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/ https://www.wikiloveswomen.org/ There must be other initiatives if others have links to share in this thread.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jmfayard 4y ago

Gender Content bias is a systemic thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_bias_on_Wikipedia

LudwigNagasena 4y ago

Crazy how people think we have been only ignoring 50% of our potential when we were ignoring like 95%.

hackernewds 4y ago
I don't understand
- teekert 4y ago
  I’d guess the 5% is some form of privileged elite. I see that.
  - input_sh 4y ago
    To quote Stephen Jay Gould: > I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
    - eevilspock 4y ago
      But without the enticement of membership in the elite, with a greater share of society's wealth, power and privileges, no one would bother working hard to become doctors, lawyers, software developers and CEOs. We need a stratified society to have all these things the modern world gives us. It is only the desire to escape the cotton fields and sweatshops that spurs people to work. It is the only reason that our world has seen amazing advancements in science, technology and business. Capitalism depends on inequality, and we depend on capitalism. This is logic of capitalism. This is our society's justification for incredible differences in pay and wealth.
      - marosgrego 4y ago
        What? One become a scientist because they are interested in things, or a doctor because they want to help people.

j7ake 4y ago

They weren’t ignored. For most of recorded history the basic unit was the family. The men were in charge of public affairs of the family, while women were in charge of private and domestic affairs. It was only recently the basic unit has been further subdivided into individuals, which required many to rely on institutional support on matters that used to be within the family, eg education, pensions, restaurants, clothing shops, apartment complexes, birth control. The truly ignored throughout history were the peasants and serfs. Most men of significance were from aristocratic or upper class upbringings. The divide is not between men and women, but haves vs have nots.

mxkopy 4y ago
- j7ake 4y ago
  The life of women in the upper class were objectively better than the male serfs. The major form of oppression back then was by class, then by gender. It is of course better to be a male aristocrat than a female aristocrat (measured from today’s individualism values ie domestic duties have zero value), but both lived vastly better lives than serfs. Being a lower class woman was an extremely oppressed state, illustrated vividly by books from Victor Hugo.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Nobody is arguing that being rich doesn't entail privelege. So why are you pointing that out? What purpose does it serve other than to distract from the original statement? To that point I'll not get distracted. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace Did you know that the world's first programmer was a woman? She published the first algorithm for the Analytical Engine.
    - ehnto 4y ago
      I think Ada Lovelace is actually the perfect example of what the OP is talking about. There are fewer famous women in history because women were given less opportunity to excel (and sometimes had achievements they did make stifled or their contribution hidden). Ada Lovelace was both an extraordinary person, and in a very privileged position. Had she just been extraordinary, she wouldn't have had the tools to leverage her abilities. Her pedigree and circumstances allowed her access to the private education and social circle that allowed her to apply her abilities and excel. The issue is that so fewer women were ever given the opportunity to excel, and that still remains the case! I felt this was an interesting article about how women were stripped of the opportunities to get into software in the 80s to much the same effect as likely many women were stripped of their opportunities during Ada's time: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when-women-stopped-coding https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/10/21/357629765/when...

wisty 4y ago

Maybe society doesn't have high enough expectations of women.

eevilspock 4y ago
Or maybe men don't have high expectations of women, or because they benefit from women having a subservient position, aren't very inclined to change society.

arethuza 4y ago

I went looking to see who the entry was for the nearest town to where I live expecting it to be Mary Somerville and was rather disappointed to find it was some chap I'd never heard of. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville Worth noting: "In 1834 she became the first person to be described in print as a 'scientist'"

jefftk 4y ago
That's what the term was coined for; the older term was "man of science"

systemz 4y ago

You can enable city names in left upper corner with "Show real place names" option

ok123456 4y ago

There's a radio button to show the city/country names instead on the left hand side.

globular-toast 4y ago

Current estimates are that around 100 billion people have ever lived. So that's a lot more than 50% that have been "ignored". It turns out that if you look for notability or exceptional attributes you will get mostly men. This is due to biology and essentially the whole reason males and sexual reproduction exists. This doesn't mean that being male will give you a better chance of being exceptional or notable, though. Quite the opposite, in fact. The bar is lower for women because simply being a woman is considered notable precisely because there are so few notable women.

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>it's like for our entire recorded history we have been ignoring 50% of our potential. Let's hope it gets a lot more mixed! I'm so sick of shit like this. It's so intellectually offensive, I can't be polite any longer. It's so incredibly rude to dismiss so many great women just because you didn't hear about them, as if being famous is the ultimate test of potential. As if being a famous author or famous SOMETHING is the ultimate goal in this life. I'll use my mother as an example. She's a truly great woman. She'll never be famous to you (she has no such vain desires anyway), but she's a great human being, much greater than you'll ever be, for she rejects DEMOGRAPHIC quotas, she's honest, and compassionate, and pious, and loving, and fun, and courageous, and every day she lives up to her potential and more, and she inspires her family and friends to do the same. She does what she does and she loves doing it and she does it well. And how willfully ignorant it is to ignore the different powers and motivations unique to men and to women. If you think there's a problem with so few famous women, then that's a personal problem, that's a you problem. You are the problem, because you are imposing your own personal beliefs and personal standards onto women.

jedberg 4y ago

Look in areas that were settled more recently, like the US west coast, and you'll find more women. But definitely not 50%.

inglor_cz 4y ago

If your criteria is "Wikipedia notability", we have been ignoring more like 98 per cent of our potential since antiquity. By far the most people who lived and died were subsistence farmers, most of them not even personally free (either serfs or slaves), and good luck making it to Wikipedia as a serf boy from Upper Nowhere, rural Campania of 635 AD. Sometimes I wonder whether the entire contemporary American obsession with race and gender has been deliberately and cynically manufactured or at least blown up beyond all proportion to keep everyone's eyes away from class, the most formidable societal barrier almost everywhere, including societies that are ethnically fairly homogenous.