A female board member told me her posts on the Politics & Religion board are routinely ignored while posts here by male members generate more discussion. 

I do notice fewer women choose to post on P&R than men; however, I don't consider gender in my replies unless it is pertinent to the topic.  I cannot speak for anyone else.

I hope this board is equally welcoming to all, but perhaps there is some unintended male chauvinsim here.

Any thoughts?

???

No, I don't think so.  I usually get responses from those who's opinion I value.

To me, the gender of a person means nothing.  It never has, and never will.

In fact, it sometimes surprises me when I actually take the time to look at a user's gender, and find out that they are not what I expected from reading things they have posted.  I think I responded to things Quirt had said for quite a while, before I even bothered to look and see her sex.  And there are a few who I thought were female, and ended up to be male.

To me, I respond to posts for several reasons.  Most often, it is either to dissagree based on my own experience, or to try and elaborate on something they have said, giving more detail or facts.

About the only types of posts I generally ignore is those that say little more then "I am right, so there".  There really is very little there to work with, so I rarely bother.  I also generally ignore those that genarally fall along the lines of "Everybody knows that such-and-such is true", since that type of statement is generally not worth even responding to.  They see everything as black-and-white, and ignore all the grey in the middle.

I moved this post from the other board to this one, since it's just more pertinent here.

There are people on this board whose genders I still don't know, and I've been posting here for over 3 years. Sometimes I've been shocked because my mind has assigned a gender to a poster's online persona which is not at all their actual gender. Tia would be an example. I thought for the longest time he was a woman, simply because he always had pictures of that actress on his sig lines and as his personal photo. And all the time, I always paid attention to his posts, because I found them informative and with good perspective.

  Nope...

A female board member told me her posts on the Politics & Religion board are routinely ignored while posts here by male members generate more discussion. 


"Relax, we're all just ones and zeroes here!"

A modest proposal -- drop the "Gender: " from beneath the user's information as displayed in the message boards.

The only time I look at the field is when I'm about to post something completely tasteless... and even then, I usually ask myself "If that field wasn't there, and I didn't know its value, would I still post this off-color one-liner?  Of course I would!", and I click "Submit".