Monday, January 5, 2009

Google and Sexism


This is a comment exchange from this page.

# Brandon M. Sergent says:
December 23rd, 2008 at 8:45 am

*sigh* I think its sexist to call something sexism that is an actual trend.

Now that everyone is done having a purse swinging tizzy of a fluke in page rank technology, how about you show me statistics on what PERCENTAGE of inventors are women?

In a world with 6.5 billion people, a counter example isn’t all that hard to find in social instances, for example name 5 organs no human has ever been born without.

Thus to understand something one doesn’t needs rules so much as trends.

Fact: Women invent less than men.
Fact: Of the top ten inventions that have improved human life the most, I’ll bet at least 8 were men.

For the record I credit women with the invention of medicine/science/philosophy as a matter of primitive likelihood. Gathering is more conducive to contemplative thought than hunting in my opinion. But that’s like saying protozoa invented humans, in that it’s a bit of a butterfly effect.
# Gravatar ANYC says:
January 4th, 2009 at 7:11 pm

Brandon - not much of a critical thinker, are you? Just because women have not had the opportunity to/nor have been given credit for something, does not indicate that they are incapable of it! Good grief, are you really so naive?
# Gravatar Brandon M. Sergent says:
January 5th, 2009 at 11:15 am

Google is a statistical machine. Google is not sexist. The demand to have it’s results altered to fit our idea of what is politically correct however, is. The fact is, the phrase “she invented” occurs so infrequently on the pages Google crawls that is was interpreted as a typo.

My guess is the VAST majority of global patent holders are unsexed (corporate) or male. Even discounting Corporate patents the trend I would say, holds.

USPTO.gov does not allow one to search by gender. But it does allow one to search by name. Toss in a few male names and then a few female names, you’ll see the tip of the ice berg.

“Yanisky-Ravid found that Israeli women accounted for just 1.9 percent of the inventors who registered their intellectual property in 2000-2005.”

Now that may be a policy problem in their country but it’s not specifically gender biased. The fact remains most of those credited with invention officially are men.

If you have a problem with facts being reported accurately, I’d say you fund an initiative to endow female inventors, or go be a creationist.

Men have abstract minds. Men dominate technology fields. Women can profit through men much easier and much more acceptably than the other way around. When a man rides a woman’s coat tail he’s a loser or a dead beat, when a woman does it she’s a home maker. Now I agree, that sucks, but tailoring Google results to hide this fact is a disservice to women, and rather Chinese in thinking.

For hundreds of years if nothing else women were footnotes in industry, that’s just how it was. Even if 50% of all current and future inventions were made by women, the stack would still be heavily in the male camp.
# Gravatar Brandon M. Sergent says:
January 5th, 2009 at 11:18 am

P.S. I’m a patented inventor.

1 comment:

  1. I agree with you Brandon, woman lag behind men in most ways, Where our strength lies is in being the chooser sex we choose who want to procreate with and in oder to be chosen me need to work hard to be seen as worthy of our attention.

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