Timeline for How often is gender actually used in comments?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
39 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Mar 11, 2021 at 23:37 | vote | accept | scohe001 | ||
| Oct 22, 2019 at 14:37 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Updated numbers--since I was including a week that hadn't been included in the SEDE dump yet, things were a little off.
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| Oct 15, 2019 at 8:41 | comment | added | NoDataDumpNoContribution | "Note that these queries don't take into account deleted comments, which may very well be the worst offenders." Gendering is not offending in general. I would not expect the ratio of gendered to non-gendered comments to change for deleted and not deleted posts. | |
| Oct 15, 2019 at 2:18 | comment | added | aparente001 | Try Academia. I've seen issues with assumed gender there. | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 16:59 | comment | added | Milo Brandt | @scohe001 I don't know how this translates to SO, but in my activity on Math SE, I found that each of the 7 times I used a gendered pronoun in comments, it referred to either external figures (e.g. historical mathematicians) or to fictional figures introduced in the question (e.g. Alice and Bob, who want to securely share a message) - so, while a query definitely can't figure out this sort of data, the number of uses of gendered pronouns to refer to a user of the site might be a relatively small percentage of the total number of uses of gendered pronouns. | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 16:33 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Making it clear that these are for SO
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| Oct 14, 2019 at 15:58 | comment | added | scohe001 | @200_success Yeaaa the issue there is that gender often plays an important role in those questions. If you're asking about your daughter, clearly I'll refer to her as "her." So it gets harder to find instances where ppl are being misgendered. SO on the other hand, almost never concerns gender. So if you see gender in a comment there, it's almost definitely a slip up that should be "they" (from the comments I spot checked). | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 15:54 | comment | added | 200_success | That's the figure for Stack Overflow. Run the query on Parenting, and the figure jumps up to 29%. | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 12:27 | comment | added | scohe001 | Hmm good catch @Colleen. I think, even if that's not a CoC case, it's still somewhere "gender is used in comments," which was what I set out to find, so I won't edit the query in the answer. You can use this query though, to ignore most cases of quote wrapped gender (it'll still catch something where the gendered word is right next to a quote though, like "He wouldn't dare.") | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 3:17 | comment | added | ColleenV | Thanks for the query - here's an example of a comment I left that was marked as "gendered", but it wasn't actually directed at a person. ell.stackexchange.com/questions/32578/… Here's me once again referring to the pronouns without actually using them: ell.stackexchange.com/questions/32711/… I don't know if you can exclude the pronouns when they're in quotes, but it may help reduce false positives. | |
| Oct 14, 2019 at 3:02 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
edited body
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| Oct 13, 2019 at 23:01 | comment | added | egerardus | @scohe001 some of this seemed relevant to another Q so I included it in another answer here. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 23:34 | comment | added | scohe001 | @Gero might be worth making another answer here to expand on that a little and give your data some more eyes. Honestly that's pretty interesting | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 22:33 | comment | added | egerardus | @scohe001 I agree and wouldn't want to obscure the primary data. Being primarily an SO user myself I was curious to see how big of a difference between SO and the other sites, if I exclude SO and SO Meta the gendered pronoun usage for last month is 2.815% (8866 of 314960) compared to only SO and SO.Meta 0.658% (4206 of 638283). Also interesting to note that there are twice as many monthly comments on SO than all other sites combined. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 21:30 | comment | added | scohe001 | Ooh @Geronimo cool find! I do think that starts to get things tangled though. Many of the less technical sites (like Parenting and Interpersonal Skills) likely have good reason to be using gendered pronouns. So I think I'll leave that query in a comment, since it's related, but not as indicative of what I'm trying to show. Still awesome though! | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 21:26 | comment | added | egerardus | I noticed that we were only querying the SO main site but found this great cross site query tool. I have modified it to include your query across all sites. Meta.SE is excluded for now because the many hypothetical use cases obscure actual uses. Across all sites (other than Meta.SE) gendered pronouns are in 1.37% of comments last month. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 21:01 | comment | added | Doc Brown | @KodosJohnson: and that's exactly the point of the whole discussion - the new CoC requires you to change your way of writing, since "they/them" can now become misgendering. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 20:00 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | @rjzii Varies a lot, but there's always some activity in chat. After the CoC changes hit, activity exploded (we're talking thousands of messages in one room in a day - that's very unusual for at least two of these rooms that're normally big and active, but nowhere near 2k+ messages per day on a normal basis). I don't have any exact numbers for you though, and as far as I know, there's no proper statistics tools for chat, at least for us mortals. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 19:15 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 19:03 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Put actual query links in
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 18:55 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 18:43 | comment | added | scohe001 | @rjzii sounds like those numbers don't exist (in a place us normal people can see, anyways). | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 18:27 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 18:12 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Updated queries to include capital first letters
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:27 | comment | added | scohe001 | Ooh good call @gung. I've added a disclaimer. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:26 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:25 | comment | added | gung - Reinstate Monica | This is a nice answer, but be aware that this searches over comments that have not been deleted. Most of the egregious stuff gets deleted & often quickly. Lots of other comments get deleted, too, so it isn't clear if the final proportion is higher or lower. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:24 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:19 | comment | added | scohe001 | @AurélienGasser the most awesome part of SEDE is that anyone can switch the site on the query with a few clicks. I don't have the time at the moment to play around with checking different sites (my goal here was just SO), but I'd encourage you to! And if you find something interesting, by all means make it an answer here :) | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:17 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 16:14 | comment | added | Aurélien Gasser | It would be interesting to break it down by technical / non-technical site, to see if there's a measurable difference | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:59 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:55 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | Don't bother analyzing chat. There's no decent way to analyze it with the public tools at hand, maybe unless you download a data dump (or <strike>bribe</strike> ask an employee nicely to compile some stats). But yeah, chat is slightly more open, and I imagine the problems might be smaller there (because stating pronouns, if it shows up, is better in chat than on main because of the format). No idea though, that's just my experience. Hopefully though, this calms down some of the concerns | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:55 | comment | added | Cave Johnson | I don't think I personally ever used gendered pronouns on Stack Exchange. I usually say "the OP" or singular their/they. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:51 | comment | added | scohe001 | @Zoethetransgirl from what I've read and seen, the outrage seems to be focused on not being able to answer an innocent C++ question without tip-toeing around the new CoC. Chat is (and has always been) more of a free-for-all and extremely difficult to moderate. I wouldn't even know how to go about analyzing that. | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:48 | comment | added | Zoe - Save the data dump | This actually shows how relatively small the problem is on main. Chat is a whole different problem though | |
| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:47 | history | edited | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:47 | history | edited | Zoe - Save the data dump | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
It's not a concrete number, it's an average
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| Oct 11, 2019 at 15:39 | history | answered | scohe001 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |