If that is what you understood then this is futile.
Playing Go or other online games is not something you need a “gender reveal” to do so.
I have been playing LoL for a decade and even organised events for it.
Noone had ever even seen my face, my name or my gender. Why? because those elements were not needed to enjoy the game
I play in the online PandaNet Go EU championship. Noone has ever seen my face. Noone stopped me from playing.
In fact, had I not visited Athens once to get in contact with the people there to give them a book sample, no person from our own team would have even known I am a real person.
Noone said “hide it” (which requires an ACTIVE choice of withholding information out of fear). That is what YOU understood.
What I said is that online you can be anything … if people choose to forego that feature, this is their prerogative, but it is not mandatory or needed.
I used to say that to my favorite fora all the time where people “demanded” that I disclose my personal information (mostly my age, back in the day) in order to have some extra ammunition to wriggle out. My face, my gender, my height and my skills are not relevant in any discussion.
Only if I make a good point or not is relevant.
Same thing applies to ANY online activity, Go included.
I’ve never asked the personal information of any players i have had the pleasure to play a game with, because it is not relevant. Only their willingness to play Go and have fun, is relevant.
I hope this clears this misunderstanding …
Oh, I agree with that, but good luck finding people to talk about it.
Already some have jumped ship from this - which is a simplier matter - and do not even want to accept the idea that for this particular activity (Go) the main issue is that we need more people in general.
I just said that “you do not need a gender online” and it was perceived as “oooooooooooooooooooooooooohhhhh you told them to hide”.
Oh, yeah, let’s talk wage gaps and economics and education, since the current topic is going so well.
And they have validated that information how?
I sent my name and picture to the team captain, who had never seen me in his life.
He then send it to PandaNet, who have also never seen him in their lives, while receiving information about another person noone has ever seen.
For all they know, I could be something as unlikely as a Jamaican living in Siberia, pretending to be Greek and submitting a random photo fished from facebook. Noone checks in the lower leagues because, it doesn’t really matter anyway.
The problem: women are being mistreated constantly. One of these is them getting paid less, another is people being surprised when they show up somewhere unexpected, like an IT department.
Stereotypes like “women are bad at IT” perpetuate such mistreatment. It doesn’t matter whether there is truth in the stereotype (I don’t believe there is, but like I said, it doesn’t matter), the problem is that these stereotypes fuel mistreatment.
To take this broader, I have the same with any kind of stereotype, including ones based on age, race, religion, etc. They don’t serve a purpose and they cause people to not look further than a rather superficial outside label. People should be judged individually, and any bias caused by stereotypes is bad.
That’s what I mean that I’m not interested in the truth.
In other threads, I read that online Go is okay, but “real” Go is better and people can’t wait for the pandemic to be over and clubs resuming their activities and real players meet with real players and play. In this thread, I learned that’s it’s ok for women to only play Go online as “Peter” and that clubs is not a big deal anyway.
Your link is quite interesting especially for the economic part. Not only but this part should be as relevant for chess as for go.
Quote from that article written by a woman chess player:
It’s not just lack of encouragement, though. It’s time. It’s priorities. It’s well-established that women do the bulk of the housework, for example. A 2016 analysis carried out by the UK Office for National Statistics finds that women carry out 60% more unpaid work. A 2019 study led by McMunn reached similar conclusions: women performed 16 hours of unpaid labour per week, and men only performed six. In 93% of couples surveyed, women did the majority of the work. The gap remains even when women are employed more gainfully than their husbands: a 2014 study led by Besen-Cassino concludes that the more a woman earns, the less housework her husband does.
This gap in unpaid labour starts early. Lam et al. (2016) discovered that young girls do more chores than young boys, and when mothers spent longer hours away from the home, the girls took on most of the extra work. UNICEF reports that girls, on average, perform 40% more chores. It’s clear to see the disadvantage girls and women are at, here. A disproportionate lack of free time will obviously contribute to lower chess achievement.
I wasn’t there, of course, but I can imagine Grace Hopper’s headmistress saying to girls’ parents: “STEM is not ladylike”. It would be the truth and great, practical advice for that era. How many Graces do we think this school must have produced?
This is true depending on the activity.
I got kicked and doxxed out of a forum in 2003 for declaring my age, for example. It is not always about gender.
They just couldn’t have 19 year olds making sense in their forum.
So what did I do?
I realised that I didn’t play by the rules of the internet, so I made what we called back then “a clone” which is a new account that didn’t disclose any information and tought them a small lesson, because I kept making the same points, but now they didn’t have any information to make personal attacks
8 years and almost 9000 posts later till the forum closed down, they thought that I was the “clone” of at least 10 different people which they knew. Of course I was none of them hehehe.
You’ve never seen a more toxic place than that … someone really did have 4 clones, which he used to attack his main account with ludicrous and outrageous slander and swear, so that other people would automatically feel more sympathetic to his “main account” with his name on it.
There was no political correctness there … it got so bad that a few of the members that where known even exchanged a few lawsuits which each other.
How about that for harassment?
Again, you assume that only you know that and somehow noone else has had problems and men live in a magic land where everything was handed to us on a plate. I do not know where that idea is coming from, but do try to avoid making such suppositions for unknown people over the internet
Yup.
hahaha good point! I had never noticed that.
The discussion is this:
My point is: “You do not need to share your personal information online, in order to participate and enjoy a service online. It is completely optional and it adds nothing of value.”
Gia took that and made: “So to feel secure online, women need to hide the fact they are female” which was not my point at all
I explained the misunderstanding by bring a few examples, including the Pandanet Online championship.
jlt said that he saw my face one the website there. ( also jlt has helped me translate my Go book in French and did a fantastic job - at no point did he ask me for ID or personal information, nor did I do anything of the sort. WE DID NOT NEED THAT INFORMATION in order to work together ONLINE, which is still my point)
and I just pointed out that noone really checks that particular data for any veracity or accuracy because they do not need to do so, and not because it is easy to obfuscate. It simply does not matter. (case in point, maybe you remember some debacles last year with people cheating and video recordings while people playing and so forth? Guess what? We do not have those in the lower leagues at all).
The only part of the championship that does matter, are the divisions where there is really something on the line and, so, people play the final stage in real life and real boards or with live video.
Be that as it may, that is an actual championship. If I was then every to get into the parts that would matter, they would check to see my ID, but that would be the point where it would no longer be an online event.
The only places where you totally need your ID online is where it overlaps with the real world.
E.g. providing real information to a courier, a bank or a shop.
I do not need my ID to play Go on OGS.
Noone has asked my ID to play LoL in the past decade.
Noone has asked for my ID to play in PandaNet’s last division.
And I sure didn’t need my ID to participate in that toxic Greek forum I mentioned earlier.
And we have totally stretched a very simple point to almost beyond recognition
Imagine if you try to have an actual conversation about those very complex and important issues you mentioned.
Yeah and my name is “Jeth Orensin” for sure
Well, in this thread I learned what I already knew.
That this is a minefield of a topic
You say one thing and most people understand whatever they already think that you think, instead of reading what you wrote and staying there. Everything has to go “somewhere else”.
What? You can “infer” things that I did not write, but noone else can?
You constantly assume that I have no idea about any kind of harassment and that is your only “response” time and time again …
well how do you know? Do you somehow have a video with all my life?
Can you send it to me, I have forgotten some things
You seem not to get Gia’s point. Imagine that everywhere on the internet, you have to pay attention not to disclose information about your age in order to avoid harassment. That would be quite unpleasant.
Great way of turning the problem around and making it about you
As far as I have read this thread, 100% of the users that declare they are female point to the same problems that Gia is stating, but there’s a lot of people who keep doubting it, try to give different excuses for the problem than the proposed “sexism” reason, or like this, try to devalue the problem by what-about-isms such as “but I have problems in my life as well”.
So you’re admitting you’re derailing this because you think you’re making a point, good.
For the record, there has never been one instance, not a single one, that you haven’t combatted any argument about sexism with “well, me personally I’ve faced a different problem, based on another issue that most decent human beings would agree is a problem, and I can’t empathize with something that isn’t about me, so let’s dismiss you and make this about me instead. Oh, and about how great I am for having found a way around my problem. See how great I am, having worked with my age, weight, nerd habits etc? You know what this means about you, right? ”
Tell me I misrepresent your take on this discussion and I can guarantee you this is 100% how you come across to me.
To those that are either naively or maliciously denying even the existence of sexism playing a role, and even going so far to actively blame women for their own misrepresentation, please reflect upon this and try to do better. It’s not a solution to say that women should simply hide. The problem is the social environment, not the victim.
To do so in the face of actual women in Go saying otherwise is just hostile and toxic. There seems to be a complete lack of self-awareness to even realize that such statements are actively part of the problem in alienating women from Go. I mean that literally several women have expressed, here and elsewhere, their deep concerns about the hostility in this thread. It’s producing harm toward this server and broader Go participation.
So much of this discussion is just terribly disappointing. It’s a sad revelation for our community.
I understand what you mean, that is why I didn’t jump on the bandwagon of people taking your sentence out of context. It is the internet, it is written language, it is easy to misunderstand something.
What I think should be considered in that kind of thing is that unless we understand how these things work and WHY, then we cannot even fix the problem you mention.
My best friend just called me about his broken printer. I’ll go have a look, but I have no idea how they work and why, so I will most probably not fix his printer.
I do not have to “imagine” it … I have been doing that for twenty years on purpose because, as I said, I never found any value in doing so. Lys found my picture. Does it add any credibility to what I say?
Nope.
Which is exactly my point.
I have actually not doubted at all about those issues. If you read what I actually wrote, my “sin” was that I said that for GO in particular and in our country, we do not have ANY people. We’d be thankful for anyone breathing to come and join.
ANYONE.
And that is a fact.
It just, somehow, doesn’t matter.
Meanwhile we can barely field a team for each PandaNet round.
Not at all … since you created the whole misunderstanding by skewing my point with things I didn’t say, I thought I’d engage in your hobby as well
“For the record, there has never been one instance, not a single one, that you haven’t combatted any argument” by just ignoring it with a “you do not know cause you are a man”
See. Anyone can get a broooooooad brush and start painting.
Have I actually done what you said? Nope. But you didn’t read all the hundreds of lines I wrote. because:
