Re:GitHub is undergoing a full-blown overhaul as execs and e...
by err4nt on Sunday February 07, 2016 @09:00PM
(#11056016)
Because everything name people use online must match their govt issued ID.
I can still remember the first time I uploaded a masculine avatar I had to get a medical exam to prove I was the same gender people seeing my picture assume I am.
Its a hard world, if only we could communicate online with a total identity of our choosing! We could all pick fake names, like a pen name, or a 'pseudo' name thay wasn't real. Wjat a crazy world THAT would be @sanctus.
For bonus points, consider the gender and racial connotations entrenched within your own username - sanctus - based on the language (latin) I'm guessing you're a white roman from antiquity!
Unless their name is in their username. Or they have a profile picture of themselves. Or they have their real name on their commits. Or their username or picture is something stereotypically masculine/feminine.
I searched for 'things' on Github and looked at the most recent committer of the first 20 responses (easiest way I could think of to get a random sample of users). For 16 of them, I could easily see that they were male. 2 of them had their names, but I wasn't sure if the names were feminine or masculine. 2 had no hints whatsoever.