Unclear whether man here means human or male human! Perhaps the wider context clarifies that?
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I am sure Go would benefit from a more equal gender balance in the numbers of Go players and Go organisers. I don’t know why there are more male than female players, it seems striking to me that there are some games/sports where there seem to be a lot more men than women (e.g. snooker, darts, table-tennis) and others where if you go to a club then the numbers are much more even (badminton or bridge for example). When I ran a Go club at a primary school during lunch break, there were a lot more girls than boys (my guess was that boys were in general more keen to play outside, but who knows?). In the junior Go club that I help to run now (in the early evening), there are fewer girls than boys. There is certainly no evidence that girls at the club are less successful at playing Go, or take it less seriously (we have had quite a few club competitions won by girls, despite their fewer numbers).
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Not all that weird really. The chiaroscuro flautist is quite intriguing, the lead player does have an odd shadow, but the rest seem pretty normal.
We’re a bit off topic, but…
Maybe it’s hard to notice for people who don’t know him but one of the players is wearing a kimono and a wig. It’s not what he usually does
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And another one looks like a boy, but he’s grown up a lot since that picture: body and strength! 
He is indeed. 
He also does stream on Twitch an has a YouTube channel. Look for miratarim if you’re interested.
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Not all that far off topic, if clumsy approaches are one thing putting women off taking up Go.
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I believe it’s referring to mankind.
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I think that it is okay for women to play go, it is a way of showing your wisdom and you have shown in well in OGS as being a moderator, congrats!
Thanks for the compliments, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean
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I just mean that it is men that is stronger than go but I think that women playing go and winning men is a form of showing how smart women are compared to men 
I still have some doubts about what you’re saying, but I don’t think women are smarter than men and I also think that making comparisons, except for statistical purposes (which have so many exceptions), is not fair. We should be talking about one player against another player.
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I don’t understand what andersonie means either but I will add that go skill is not equivalent to intelligence.
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This thread has become like a carnival attraction where men step right up and reveal their personal gender stereotypes…
… it’s pretty cringey to be honest : (
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It might be so, but this is actually useful, considering that the alternative is that noone shows up.
As a former teacher I can tell you that the worst thing in class is to ask a question and either receive silence or blank stares … chances are the students have not understood a single thing and they are spaced out. We’ve all been students, so I guess we can all empathise with that, right?
But if you are actually on the teaching side, the “we have a problem to fix” side, you have a very hard issue in your hands since you have no feedback, no inkling what went wrong and where you lost the students.
Add to that the obvious problem that each student is learning in a different way and may have a different point in the lesson where they dropped the ball and you are in a pickle on how to get things rolling again for everyone involved. That is if you want to do the job right. I am sad to say that some teachers that I have had were happy to plod along until they clock out and just not care, but I think that we will agree that noone was ever fond of those kind of teachers.
So, the point is that it is not, after all, an issue that’s going to be solved tomorrow, so a lot of data and feedback is going to be needed. And that’s rarely fun.
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Ok, I’ll bite again, since I have no clue what your point is right now.
Am I correct that your reaction to tonybe’s feeling that there are a lot of cringey comments of people spreading their personal gender stereotypes, with “it’s better that people publicly state their stereotypes, than that they stay silent”?
I honestly don’t think that men staying silent about their gender-related stereotypes is at all a problem within the sexism debate… Rather the opposite, to be honest.
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On one hand, I admire your idealistic optimism that the discussion here will be useful in generating some kind of change.
On the other hand - when I look at the social dynamics of this thread, and the other gender-related threads that have taken place on OGS - they unfortunately tend to follow a very different pattern.
Rather than being in this “classroom” setting where everyone is equally eager and willing to learn, what I’m seeing happen over and over is:
- female members will come and share their experience
- this quite often leads to male members then denying their experience is valid because it either doesn’t match their experience, or is not backed up by some form of statistics/proof, etc…
- this forces the female members to have to defend their original experience, or even their right to try to have their experience be taken seriously
Also, rather than leading to any forum-wide change or learning, it seems (to me at least) that the majority of the men who find women’s experience alienating leave these threads with the same opinions they came in with - that everything is fine, that nothing needs to change, and that these women (on some fundamental level) don’t know what they’re talking about…
So … yeah, it’s a great idealistic thought, but when it comes to the female members of OGS having to shoulder the burden of standing up for the validity of their experience - over, and over, and over again - it doesn’t really play out the way you imagine when the rubber hits the road : /
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This thread is much more (especially in the days before that comment): Flirting advice, talk about pair go and men vs women games. I wonder how you come to that conclusion (and I find the timing a bit odd). But some people seem to share your opinion.
Specifically, what made me make that comment at that particular time was that I personally felt that the two comments made in this thread by andersonie were patronizing and bordering on insulting to the females in this thread.
To be fair, this was also what made me ask you for clarification regarding your comments on the difference in interest level in Alpha Go by gender …
By and large, I find that men feel very comfortable spouting their opinions about how the world is, how it should be, and what role women should play in that world based on their opinions.
They rarely take the time or effort to step out of their own shoes and realize that their way of telling other people what they should or should not be like might be fundamentally unwelcome, sound misguided / uninformed, and might come across as insulting or belittling.
Also, the fact that you seem to feel that a “Women in Go” thread is the appropriate place to discuss “flirting advice” fills me with concern and a certain amount of forlorn sadness for the human race : /
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I must note that my “flirting” posts were originally part of an entirely different thread, that could take such light-hearted joke. I disagreed with them being moved here specifically because they are not suited for this discussion, but it is what it is now. 
The rest, men basically drove us out and hijacked the thread to make it the usual lounge talk. You can see the shift.
On another note, agreeing with @tonybe, it’s really funny (not) how men who see women leaving these discussions, fed up with talking to the wall, perceive it as something well done. Basically, we rest our case.
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To be honest, I feel slightly responsible for this, as I had moved the initial comment that sparked this from the thread welcoming Sofiam as a moderator; it appeared as a continuation of the discussion here, but was made in the wrong place.
In hindsight, perhaps that part of the discussion should’ve been moved to its own topic, but I’m not sure if a specific thread solely with the purpose of discussing flirting is really something to be desirable either…
If you have a solution, let me know
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