Anyone Else Routinely Get their Name Masculinized?

Although masculine assumption happens all the time in "real life." I actually have a t-shirt that says "Yes, I'm in the right bathroom." ;)

The other thing that happens a lot, are replies that imply that somehow I am misspelling my own name and it 'should' be Aaron. (this usually makes me laugh).

That just made me laugh out loud. I had no idea that people were /that/ entrenched in gender stereotypes. Fascinating... (and extremely frustrating, I'm sure.)

I used to hide behind an assumed gender when I used the IRC nick "Aserrin". People always assumed that the person with that nick was male, and I didn't go out of my way to correct them. Why not? Because they didn't try to get me into bed with that nick, they always treated me like an equal and "one of the guys" and I never had trouble convincing people that I really am technically oriented when I used that nick.

Oh gosh! This is hilarious. YES, I have had this happen to me. People directly reply to me and refer to me as Brendan. Like, hello? Only once or twice, though. That's bizarre it happens all the time.

I also used to go by gender neutral names for most of my life online. The whole, "Are you a girl??" "yeah right, why are you pretending to be girl?" crap only needed to happen a few times until I had enough.

My name doesn't get masculinized, but I frequently get "sir" on the phone. I guess from 30+ years working almost exclusively with men.

I've also had that "Girls don't program."

Nancy Dru

I get called "Jason," among other crazy pronunciations... My name definitely isn't common though, so it's understandable I guess :)

I tend to get attitude (and generally less respect) at times because the guy just cannot believe that I'm going to be able to handle his project... That is until they get to know me of course. It doesn't happen too often too often, but when it does it takes a hell of a lot for me to stay quiet!

This is a funny thread... of course, I am ALWAYS referred to as Mr. Andre, which cracks me up. I usually don't bother correcting tho, as it is so much more fun to watch what happens when they realize the mistake. It's interesting to me just how many women make that mistake as men.

Reminds me of one of the worst 'office party' experiences I'd ever had too... went to my husband's office party YEARS ago and got 'stuck' with the wives, who were baffled when they asked what I did, and I replied "I'm an engineer". Dead silence turned quite awkward before the boss' wife burst out that she thought it was great that I worked on trains. After that, I went along and told them quite sincerely that the reason I became an 'engineer' was because I LOVED wearing those cool striped hats. No Kidding, this actually happened.

Love this group, btw :-)

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hey, why be normal?

You guys (ahem) I mean gals have me in stitches. I've not had anyone masculinize my name but I'm not really doing any hardcore programming for a living either. Hmmm, I'm really truly thinking of switching gears here and digging deep to find out if it is something I really could do since my father likes to remind me of how long I went to school for this industry. I don't think there's much you could do to misstep Tanisha unless you were just really trying hard.

Tanisha

but then, it's hard to do that with Lynette =) Though 'Lynn' can be either. I've had every mangled spelling of my name possible.

On the opposite side, I've worked with a Hilary and a Stacy, both men. Stacy's sig file was 'On the internet, nobody knows you're a guy.', so I guess he got a lot of 'she' in his time.

when i was in taiwan, i was constantly taken for a guy- with my last name inverted james heather. made banking fun! but i think that is due to having a welsh(?) last name- which is a first name. but then again, i bumped into a guy online who's name is actually James Heather, and he gets the opposite problem, with people thinking he's female. i like using hjames as a nickname usually- since it means people do assume i'm a guy. dunno what that means, lol.

i joined drupal.org a while back - and i remember when they first added members listing pages, (2004 maybe?) where you could add interests, gender and location info- then click the link to find others like you. i remember someone (presumably a guy) cracking a joke that the first thing they did was check to see where the ladies were on drupal.org. at that point i felt very conspicuous being one of a handful of females.

i went to a drupal meet up in galway, and i was thinking in the back of my head i would be the only girl there- but in fact there were 4! i think 4? out of 12 or something? i think that's pretty good!

/me waves to stella

IRL, no one mixes up my gender. However, online, I lean towards not exposing that I am female. I choose gender ambiguous screen names and keep the topic of conversation away from anything gender specific.

Without even knowing, people make assumptions and sadly too frequently those assumptions are negative. I prefer to stick to the facts and the matter at hand. And frequently, the resulting assumptions are that I am male :)

I suppose I do this because in the face-to-face world I struggle a lot more due to my appearances. Although I am 27, I still look as though I "must have just turned 18". I don't have a serious work face, either, in addition to people's assumptions about women in an engineering capacity. As such, I've been dismissed and ignored on more occasions than I care to continue, so I avoid such assumptions when online.

I have once or twice been called Brendan instead of Brenda on usergroup speaking thingies.

Not nearly as bad as a colleage of mine named "Joh" who gets her name corrected by people to be "John", on emails, and on delivery slips for servers.

She went off to a data centre at the other end of the country, where they refused entry to her because she didn't look like a John.. (despite the original notification clearly saying Joh) She had to fly home without completing the work.

Has anyone else encountered data centres where the Ladies toilets were considered unnecesary and therefore used for storage (i.e, completely full of boxes, no entry possible)? In a previous job I worked in buildings from the 1930s that just didn't have women's toilets at all (they were hydro power stations).. the only ladies toilets were 2 kilometres up the road in the office buildings.

I admit I've never really encountered anyone masculinizing my name. However I have been referred to as "he" quite a number of times on IRC. This hasn't happened as often since I changed my nick from "snpower" to "stella", but it has happened even as recently as yesterday. I would have thought Stella was a fairly recognisable female name, maybe I'm wrong. I guess the fact is most programmers are male and so they just assume the rest of us are too. I used to just let people assume what they wanted to assume, but more recently I'm correcting them, and going "umm, no actually...". They're usually apologetic and I find it kinda funny to see their reactions. :)

Haha, happens to me all the time, especially on IRC where people seem to go to the trouble to retype my name as "stephen" or "stephan". Also a lot of "Yeah, what he said" kinda replies. I love calling people on it :)

At least with washrooms at tech conferences, the women's ones are usually empty. It's great to walk past a line of dudes outside their washroom and waltz right into the ladies' with no waiting!

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OK, today's email and sms from a recruiting company completely took the cake. They were in Hebrew, which is a gender specific language, and it was obvious that the mail and sms that they sent me were bulk messages that they sent with a mail merge and that they didn't put any gender-checking into their merge. I mean, why should they write a mail merge that checks for gender and adjusts the message accordingly? Or just write your mail in a non-gender-specific way? Women aren't software engineers! Sheesh!

//end vent