And yet, whenever I encounter a form which has it as an option, I select my title to be "Mx".

I've even stopped my usual practice of choose His Excellency - much to the dismay of my postie, I'm sure!

Why though? I've got two good reasons and one silly one.

The first is selfish. My gender and marital status are no-one's business other than mine and my spouse's. I don't care if it messes with your demographic data. You do not need to know which chromosome configuration I'm rocking in order to deliver a parcel to me.

The second is selfless. It helps normalise things for my enby friends. The more times people see this title in the wild, the less remarkable it will be. It's no different to referring to one's husband or wife as "partner".

Finally, as a Certified Agent of Chaos, I rather enjoy the small pause that people make when addressing me on the phone. How do you pronounce "Mx"?⁰ It isn't entirely obvious. And the title is still new enough that I've had more than one person tell me the computer has made a mistake and they'll correct it!

I hope this doesn't come across as me wanting to cosplay as a minority. I just don't want to live in a boring monochrome world of strictly defined binaries - and I want to make it slightly easier for people to be themselves.

Next time you're filling in a form, why not try picking Mx as your title. What's the worst that could happen?

It's a short and readable paper with some jaw-dropping anecdotes. Like the man who immediately got a pay rise after his transition, despite working in exactly the same job as before; women were on a lower pay scale...

At a basic level you can see why, when computer memory was measured in tens of kilobytes, it made sense to say male==0 and female==1. Why waste precious bits on something which could only ever be binary? Why create an option to change a data field which is immutable? Why design a schema which would allow a woman to be married to another woman?

And yet, even with those constraints, people were able to change their "official" gender within the database. Oh, sure, there were all sorts of cludges (both technical and political) - but it was possible.

The paper sparked four main thoughts for me.

There's No Such Thing As Immutable

For all the talk of Blockchain solving the world's issues (🤣) sometimes it is necessary to "rewrite history". People make mistakes. Assumptions change. Knowledge improves. Lots of facts, it turns out, are matters of perspective.

A really good example of this is time. I don't mean pesky things like timezones and leap seconds. I mean that, due to general relativity, one second on the moon is not equal to one second on Earth. How does your time-ordered database cope with that?

You might very well live in a culture where divorce is impossible, or where sexual consent cannot ever be revoked, or where a person can only be married to one other person at a time. But these are all societal conventions which are liable - and indeed likely - to change.

I'm almost tempted to say that the boolean type shouldn't exist in modern databases!

Diverse Teams Build Better Products

I don't know how many computer programmers in the 1960s were part of the LGBTQ+ community. And I don't know how accepting their colleagues would have been of them.

Perhaps you have read and memorised every single one of the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About... lessons. But surely it is more efficient to build a team who are empowered enough to confidently correct their colleagues' incorrect assumptions about how the world is arranged?

We bake rigid assumptions into our designs not out of malign intent (usually) but because we're ignorant. That's only shameful if we refuse to listen to other people's experiences.

Computers Serve Humans - not the other way around

Most of us have been forced to lie to a computer at one time or another. Perhaps it is a system which insists that you must have a US-style ZIP code. Or that your name must be longer that three characters. Or that you don't have an apostrophe in your email address. Or that your wife is Mrs, not Ms.

I know for sure that you've filled in a paper form where the boxes were too small and you've had to decide how to truncate your data.

Why? Because people have designed a schema which doesn't account for the variety in the world.

Today's constraints aren't tomorrow's

As I said at the start, it's understandable that designers designed around the constraints they faced. But these days, we have an awareness of the likely progress of technology.

It's said that the Apollo Moon landings were only possible because the designers skated to where the puck was going to be. They made reasonable assumptions about what technology was going to be developed in the future.

Yes, we should try and build things which perform well on existing and historic hardware. But we can't ignore the fact that tomorrow's computers will be smaller, faster, cheaper, and more efficient.

Does it make sense to store a human's name as:

CREATE TABLE people (
  name VARCHAR(32) CHARACTER SET latin1
);

Probably not. Disk space is cheap and getting cheaper. Perhaps people of the future will have names consisting of 500 emoji? Or perhaps people with "exotic" Unicode characters will want to use our services.

Oh, I'm sure there will be a performance hit if every column is essentially unlimited. But that's an argument to design better database engines - not to limit human expression.

Read More

You can read "Hacking the Cis-tem" in the IEEE or, if that's not available to you, read the pre-print.

These are the facts: throughout history human beings have had sex. Sexual culture did not begin in the sixties. It has always been celebrated, needed, wanted and desired part of what it means to be human. So: what can learn by looking at the sexual lives of our ancestors? What does it tell us about our attitudes and worries today, and how can the past teach us a better way of looking forward?I

I'm not quite sure what to make of this book. It is exploration of how sex and sexual attitudes have changed over the years - but flits between being a bright-and-breezy pop-sci book an academic work.

There's a great quote partway through the book:

Any form of gender or sexual identity that exists today, has existed throughout history. Our sexual landscape has always been a wild and untamed thing

But, as the book continues, it becomes clear that there is a constant drumbeat from those who want to suppress our natural proclivities. Frustratingly, it never really gets into the why. What causes such seemingly abrupt changes in sexual attitudes? Why do certain societies develop taboos which didn't trouble their ancestors?

There are lots of great anecdotes. It's also interesting to spot the "life hacks" which allowed members of the gentry to flout the rules and conventions of their time. There's also this amusing little diversion about Anne Lister:

Although she did not have the vote herself, she could instruct her male tenants how to vote

Outstanding!

It's a good overview of what has changed (and what hasn't) - and is probably a good introduction for the sort of pub-bores who go on about the moral degeneracy of today's youth.

I'm a civil servant (this is a personal blog) so I can't comment on the politics behind the idea. But I think it is fair to say that, over the years, it fell out of fashion. Open Data kept being published but very few people looked. Sure, there was the occasional news story where a journalist discovered that the Ministry for Paperclips had accidentally purchased a nuclear submarine on the corporate credit card. But crowdsourcing using the Internet was a very early-2000s idea and the mooted "army" never really materialised.

I thought it was, sadly, a dead concept. Until yesterday:

Gender Pay Gap Bot

@PayGapApp

In this organisation, women's median hourly pay is 13.5% lower than men's.

IBM

@IBM

👩🏻‍💻🧑🏾‍💼👩🏼‍🔬

In celebration of #InternationalWomensDay, take a look at some of the timeless contributions and technological advancements developed by women of IBM. ⬇️ pic.x.com/zZvbuDdUXH

---

---

The UK compels all companies with 250 or more employees to publish data on their gender pay gap. Both public organisations and private companies have to do this.

And so, Francesca Lawson and Ali Fensom built a Twitter bot. Whenever a corporate Twitter account Tweets about International Women's Day - the bot quotes the Tweet with that organisation's gender pay gap.

The results have been beautiful!

Helen

@heldutson

I have never seen any single account wreak more havoc on branded social content than the Gender Pay Gap Bot

---

There is an entire thread of accounts who were so ashamed of being called out that they deleted their Tweets:

madeline odent

@oldenoughtosay

a thread of all the employers who deleted their #IWD2022 tweets as a result of getting called out by the @PayGapApp: because i love mess

---

There are a few (and only a few) organisations which have achieved parity.

Gender Pay Gap Bot

@PayGapApp

In this organisation, men's and women's median hourly pay is equal.

St John Ambulance England

@stjohnambulance

St John's brilliant Women's Network. 💚

Happy International Women's Day. #BreakTheBias #IWD2022

---

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And even fewer where the gap is negative.

Gender Pay Gap Bot

@PayGapApp

In this organisation, women's median hourly pay is 2.7% higher than men's.

London Fire Brigade

@LondonFire

#IWD2022 Meet Tiarna: “People are surprised when I say I'm a firefighter. I find it hard sometimes being the only woman on my Watch & for a time I was the only black person at my station. But to make a change you need to be present & represent” orlo.uk/FKHpD pic.x.com/00LhU93y6N

---

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You can argue about whether the data are accurate or meaningful. And you can argue whether a small gap in either direction is statistically significant. There's also a good thread about the impact of furlough on these statistics. It's also debatable as to whether this sort of action will result in meaningful change.

But what you can't argue with, is that this is the epitome of the "armchair auditor" concept. And I'm extremely glad it is back.

Most literature is written in the 1st person ("I opened the door") or the 3rd person ("She picked up a fork"). But very occasionally, mostly in interactive fiction, authors use the 2nd person ("You break open the crate").

And herein lies the problem. When you are reading a book, you is you. You isn't a character with different attributes. You are necessarily your own gender, race, age, and so on. Unless it is made explicit in the text ("You run a hand through your greying beard" or a character says "Where are you going, girl?") then the protagonist is assumed to be like you in every way.

Imagine, just for a moment, that English had a gendered "You". For example "Mou" and "Fou" (yes, I know gender is more complicated than that). When experiencing 2nd person text, Fou automatically know what gender Fou are.

Some languages do have this feature. Traditional Chinese used to have 你 and 妳 to differentiate between gendered You - although both were pronounced the same. Nowadays only 你 is used.

Mou open a book, inside are strange letters. As mou read each word, mour eyes light up. As you read, mou realise that mou're not who mou thought mou were. Mou've always known mou were the protagonist, and now mou'd better stop reading and help mourself to more cake.

This is, perhaps, a silly idea.

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and travelled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behaviour, but many more got away with it.

This book is hilarious and horrifying. Did you know that women were banned in France from wearing trousers? If they wanted to wear "male" clothing they had to apply to the police and pay for a permit. The ban was overturned in... 2013!

The whole book is full of maddening little anecdotes about the way society treated (and still treats) women who deviate from societal expectations. At times, all you can do is to laugh to stop yourself crying. The book sometimes feels like a catalogue of Fragile Masculinity - as men of the age rage against women encroaching into "their" territory". The fear that a woman might do as good a job as a man - as an employee or as a lover - is seen as an existential threat which must be crushed.

It is difficult to place modern attitudes on historic figures. Our notions of people's gender and sexuality don't always fit with how they thought of themselves. Are these "gal-pals" or lesbians? Is this person wearing men's clothes out of economic necessity or because they are Trans? We can't ever know their lived experience, but the author uses great care and sensitivity to describe all those involved.

Because the book is drawn from contemporary news reports, it can get a little repetitive. Tiny glimpses of a life told through a paragraph in a provincial newspaper. But it only serves to reinforce the message that women have always worn men's clothes. And almost always been subject to ridicule or punishment for it.

The book mostly draws from English-language reports, so is firmly tied to the Anglosphere - with occasional forays into France, Germany, and China. It is meticulously referenced, and contains some images of news cuttings to peruse.

Much like Miranda Kaufmann "Black Tudors", it is a fascinating book which uncovers a facet of history which is often conveniently ignored.

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy. The book is released later this year and can be pre-ordered using the links below:

The English language is adaptable. We'll happily bodge words together to make new ones, verb our nouns, and grammar-flex to the point of breaking. It's a fun language!

English is (mostly) genderless. The French have le chat and la table - because cats are boys and tables are girls, apparently. In Portuguese, the boys are "os meninos" but the girls are "as meninas".

Humans have pronouns (for example: he, she, they are common - but many others are available). For lots of people, it's reasonably obvious from context what their pronouns are. Calling someone by the wrong pronoun can be a bit offensive. The offence ranges from a minor social faux-pas all the way up to harassment.

Imagine that instead of being referred to by your correct pronoun, someone called you "it". That's not very nice, and rather dehumanising.

English society has become a lot less formal over time. It used to be the case that you would be introduced to someone by their title. "This is Mr Smith, the bank manager." Nowadays it is "Hey! I'm Dave, the bank manager". Whether the casualisation on social intercourse is a good thing is a subject for another blog post.

The advantage of the old way was that you often (but not always) got to know someone's pronouns from their title. Mr = he/him, Mrs = she/her.

But titles aren't always useful.

Sometimes, they "leak" personal information. Mrs vs Miss - tells someone if you're married or not. Hence the push by second wave feminism to use the term "Ms" to denote female, without revealing social status.

A gender-neutral version is "Mx". Which is widely accepted by UK institutions and doesn't "leak" gender. I often use Mx when I don't think an organisation needs to know my gender or marital status - but I still use he/him as pronouns.

Some other formal titles don't convey gender. English doesn't have Doctor / Doctoress, for example. Some gendered terms are obscure to most people - Editor / Editrix.

(The German language gets round this by addressing female doctors as "Frau Doktor".)

So even if we returned to a more formal way of speaking to people, it wouldn't necessarily get us to use the right pronouns.

Given that we want to avoid being rude, and understanding that misgendering someone can be a source of distress, what stops us introducing people with their pronouns?

I think part of the problem is that pronouns can feel awkward. There's no simple way to introduce someone and their pronouns in spoken English. It's easy to say "This is Ms Smith" - but I can't think of a convenient way to say out loud "This is Jane (she/her)". I suppose I could say "This is Jane, she uses female pronouns" - but it doesn't trip off the tongue.

Similarly, when I say "I'm Terence. He/Him." it doesn't feel very natural. That's not a great argument against doing something. And I dare say it will get more common in time.

Not everyone feels comfortable declaring their pronouns. For some, it feels unnecessary (ah! to have such privilege) and for others it starts a conversation they may not want to have. Some people are flexible about how others addresses them.

Language changes are difficult. As we grow older, we lose neuroplasticity. It can be hard to accept that the word "gay" no longer means "carefree", or that "wicked" isn't the epitome of cool.

This isn't to excuse people for failing to adapt - but I think it helps explain why it is hard for them to change.

In text, I wondered about using Emoji as a signifier.

Terence Eden is on Mastodon

@edent

Do you consider it acceptable to use Unicode symbols as identifiers of preferred pronouns? Saw it in someone's bio and wasn't quite sure what to make of it.
For example:
♂ He/Him
♀ Her/She
⚧ They/Them
Etc.
I guess the symbols are slightly obscure. Does that matter? 🤔

---

But the general consensus was that they didn't correlate strongly enough, and are somewhat obscure.

I'm happy putting "he/him" in my Twitter bio - and anywhere else that needs it. But the grumpy old codger in me wishes there was a more elegant way to do it.

I don't have a conclusion to this blog post. The world moves on, and it's up to us to keep pace with it. Sometimes it takes a while to catch up. I hope I'm doing the right thing, and I trust my friends to gently nudge me if I'm not.

Much rarer is seeing "... & daughters".

But, of course, the plural of anecdote is not data!

The UK register of businesses - Companies House - has a pretty good search engine.

Doing a search for AND SON returns 220,000 results. We use the singular because that should also match the plural.

Instinctively, how many "AND DAUGHTER" businesses do you think they are? Fewer? By how much?

A search for AND DAUGHTER returns 206,000 results!

At first glance, they look similar. Yay gender equality! But there's a problem. Both searches also return dissolved companies.

Additionally, "AND SON" also matches "ANDSON" - which distorts the results. How can we get all the live companies in the system? The search doesn't offer any filters.

Companies House offers a nifty search API. But, sometimes, for tasks like this, we just want a honking big CSV. It's 2.2 GB. You're not opening that in Excel. It's PANDAs TIME!

This PDF contains details of all the currently trading businesses in the UK. Let's open it up!

# Import the library
import pandas as pd

# Read only the first column into a dataframe
df = pd.read_csv("BasicCompanyDataAsOneFile-2020-07-01.csv", usecols=["CompanyName"])

What are we looking for? We can't just search for "SONS" and that will bring back things like "HENDERSONS". Some businesses use "AND SONS" others use "& SONS". Some have "&SONS". We also have to account for the singular.

This quick-and-dirty regex will attempt to find any of the above, without also getting "AND SONGS", for example. Do tell me if there's a better way.

(?:AND |\&)\s?SON([S?]|[\s])

In Pandas terms, that's:

df[df['CompanyName'].str.contains('(?:AND |\&)\s?SON([S?]|[\s])')]

Which prints out:

                                              CompanyName
258                                  & SON STUDIO LIMITED
307                         &SONS TRADING COMPANY LIMITED
467      (BOWEN AND SONS) BAS MECHANICAL SERVICES LIMITED
19492                       1ST CLASS REMOVALS & SONS LTD
28096                                     24LEX & SON LTD
...                                                   ...
4667235                                   ZOLEE & SON LTD
4668636                                    ZORAN&SONS LTD
4668689                             ZORBAS & SONS LIMITED
4671244         ZYBERI & SONS CAPITAL INVESTMENTS LIMITED
4671350                      ZYGMUNT CURRY & SONS LIMITED

[17950 rows x 1 columns]

Or, you can run len() on the output to get the count.

Running the same for DAUGHTER returns:

                                   CompanyName
246                         & DAUGHTER LIMITED
86594          A STEWART AND DAUGHTERS LIMITED
98526                  A.R & DAUGHTERS LIMITED
100064        A.W.F FLETCHER AND DAUGHTERS LLP
179094                   AFI AND DAUGHTERS LTD
...                                        ...
4568242         WILSON SON & DAUGHTERS LIMITED
4582108  WIZDOM: BY OSAGIE & DAUGHTERS LIMITED
4583025        WK LUMSDEN AND DAUGHTER LIMITED
4649690           Z.J. KUBANEK & DAUGHTERS LTD
4669405                     ZS & DAUGHTERS LTD

[320 rows x 1 columns]

Oh. There are about 56x as many "AND SON" businesses as there are "AND DAUGHTER" businesses. Of course, these data don't tell us anything about the size of the businesses or how successful they are. It doesn't tell us how many companies are named "sons and daughters". And a dozen other little data issues.

But, I think the trend is clear. Over time, approximately the same number of "& SONS" businesses and "& DAUGHTER" businesses have been registered. But far more DAUGHTERs have been dissolved.

Why is that?

But why this ordering? Why distinguish between male and female doctors? Let's see if the source code holds any answers.

As many of you may have guessed, the website is German. Herr Doctor and Frau Doctor are distinct titles. In some societies, it is extremely rude to refuse to use someone's correct title.

But, again, why are the titles presented in this way?

Next time you fill in an official form which asks for sex information, notice that it is almost always in the format Male / Female. Why is "male" first? It isn't alphabetical - the normal way to order things. And it's not in demographic proportion - there are more women than men.

If the above list were in alphabetic order, in English it would have "Dr (Fem)" first. In German it would be "Divers" first. So who made the choice to put it in this specific order? And why isn't the first title, for example, Frau Professor?

What choices have been made, and why have they been made?

Very.co.uk

Here's another example, the British shopping site Very.co.uk I suspect that they know their user base is predominantly female. But do their demographics also skew towards married? Is that why they've put Mrs first?

I recommend reading Kate Roberts' "Women On Top: Inappropriate Dropdowns" - which takes a proper look at the usability of dropdown ordering.

British Airways

BA have a weird grouping. After the "normal" titles is a hodge-podge of Captains, Rabbis, and Reverends. What's the order? Why are some grouped alphabetically and others not? How easy is it to quickly find the correct title on this list?

Emirates

Emirates are quite happy to use young women as part of their advertising images. But "Miss" comes at the bottom of their title list.

Who are we leaving out?

The approach by British store Fortnum and Mason is extremely inclusive.

But they're still sticking Mr on top...! Lord comes before Lady etc.

And they're missing my title - "Supreme Commander".

Are titles important?

I'm torn. I remember as a teenager receiving my first letter addressed to Mr Eden. I was so proud. But today, everything seems to be so casual. Call centres refer to me by my first name. My bank sends emails addressing me as "Dear Terence".

Of course, I'm cisgendered and only rarely misgendered when speaking to people. It doesn't distress me when people get my title wrong.

It comes down to why you collect title. Do you really need to know the gender of your user or their marital status? Is knowing educational attainment or religion necessary to good functionality?

Rather than offering a drop-down of limited options - which is guaranteed to exclude someone - perhaps it makes more sense to just ask the user how they would like to be addressed.

Give your users a free-form text box - and make it optional.

Do you have a female brain or a male brain? Or is that the wrong question? We live in a gendered world where we are bombarded with messages about sex and gender. On a daily basis we face deeply ingrained beliefs that your sex determines your skills and preferences, from toys and colours to career choice and salaries. But what does this constant gendering mean for our thoughts, decisions and behaviour?

I saw Professor Rippon give a talk about this book a few months ago, and have been itching to read it ever since.

It's a weighty tome - and deservedly so. It takes in the full history of neuroscience and attempts to understand whether men and women have different brains, different physical structures, and different abilities.

It is rigorous and compelling. Not exactly an easy read - and it feels like it tackles the same subjects repeatedly. But then again, the same old rubbish keeps popping up.

If you'd like to buy the hardback, I can recommend popping in to the Vagina Museum shop in London.

Find out more at ThePayGap.com

1. Reduced chance of having an affair while away on business
   • ⚤ Hetrosexuals only!
2. Won't accidentally mistake a CEO for a cocktail waitress
   • 💁🍸 embarrassing!
3. Excellent networking opportunities in the long queue for the men's toilets 🚽🚹
   • ⚣ Possible risk of inadvertent homosexuality!
4. Impossible to sexually harass people who aren't there
   • 📵 Still possible via social media though! 🤳
5. Getting blind drunk and pissing in a public fountain is unlikely to upset anyone of a delicate constitution
   • Watch out for lady-policemen! 👮‍♀️
6. No distracting breasts. Dudes never say "My eyes are up here!"
   • Pectoral muscles should be admired, obviously! 🏋️‍♂️
7. "Guys" is a perfectly acceptable term for a group of people.
   • Goes double if any of them are actually named "Guy"! 🤼‍♂️
8. The strippers you oggle at a supplier's exhibition booth don't have an intimidating amount of technical knowledge
   • Do double check they're not spies though! 👯‍♀️🕵️
9. All the t-shirt shwag will be properly sized for your manly body
   • Although you won't be able to bring one home for the missus! 👕
10. Chaps are just better!
    • ♂️♂️♂️

Look, do I need to spell out that this is satire? Well, it would be, if it weren't so terrifyingly real.

Morten Rand-Hendriksen is elsewhere

@mor10

Replying to @mor10"I always get drunk people hitting on me at after parties. It's incredibly uncomfortable. I'm there to network, not hook up."

---

Sarah

@fevered

Replying to @mor10@mor10 Yeah I can say this is a thing I expect now, which is sad! It sucks to go to tech conferences as a lady knowing someone, somewhere is going to hit on me. I'm just here for the technical information, dude.

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Kay L. Kirkpatrick

@kay314159

This. I’ve been mistaken for a waitress at a conference. (In which I gave a plenary talk.) x.com/laura_boykin/s…

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Faintdreams

@faintdreams

One of the few upsides of being a woman at a Tech conference is that during breaks there is never a queue for the toilets..

---

Phoenix Perry

@phoenixperry

Hey guy friends, I just want to say that if you came onto a woman at a conference and it was not welcome, you owe her an apology. I have so many bad memories of this happening to me again and again in my 30's that now I'm in my 40's I still hold a grudge. I hope you all grew up.

---

manwhohasitall

@manwhohasitall

"I'm not hung up on being called a 'firewoman' because I know it covers both women and men." Sam, male firewoman #FirefightingSexism

---

MotherOfAdults🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿🦄🐴

@poorponyowner

Replying to @manwhohasitall@manwhohasitall @caitlinmoran My mum was once described as a "lady policeman". And my ex, a charge nurse was once described as a "make sister" 😂😂😂

---

To men who splain me on how „guys” is gender neutral while purchasing a ticket to my conference—I will gladly void your ticket. Bye. Fantastic Ms Fox

Charlotte Jee

@charlottejee

@i4_1 The number of times I've been to a tech conference and found I'm the only woman there who isn't a 'booth babe' is truly depressing

---

ashe dryden

@ashedryden

I've decided I'm not taking shirts from conferences anymore unless they're women's fit. This "unisex" crap is terrible if you have boobs.

---

Fronk have decided that women are under-served in the wearables market. Their (male) CEO, (male) chief designer, (male) head of strategy, and (male) CTO have the secret to getting women to wear fitness trackers - gold plate them, cover them in crystals, and sell them as though they were jewellery.

OK, fair enough, I'm sure their market research bears that out - but what are they really selling? That was the rather blunt question I asked them.

"Wellness!"

"I beg your pardon?"

"We sell wellness. We let a women know when she is feeling stressed, what times of the day her heart rate spikes, and we provide a support system to help women cope with the rigours of everyday life."

"Ah," I said, almost without thinking, "You mean 'Women are broken - let's fix them.'"

There was a sharp intake of breath. Then a little disagreement. Not all of it friendly.

"No!" They contended, "We believe that modern women face a multitude of challenges - and they are primarily concerned with their Wellness."

"OK, but what is Wellness?"

"Women feel that the stresses of modern life can have a negative impact on their Wellness. We want to help them feel better about themselves, and feel more confident that they understand their bodies."

"Women are sad - buy our tracker and feel happy?"

"It's more than a feeling - we want them to understand what their body is going through. Our new Fronk-Bracelet helps a woman understand her hormonal cycle. An essential part of Wellness."

"Oh! So it's a medical device?"

"No no no - it's a Wellness device."

"But surely measuring fertility and giving advice based on that would make it a medical service?"

"It's a Wellness service. We don't make any medical claims."

I looked around their open-plan co-working space. A space I'd wandered into without being challenged by security. Where several employees had gone to lunch and left their computers unlocked. Where passwords and server configs were written on whiteboards.

"Where do you store this medica... excuse me! Where do you store this Wellness data?"

"It's encrypted!"

"OK, so this encrypted data - which contains heart rate, stress details, sleep cycle, body temperature - and which is emphatically not medical data - what do you do with it? How does it promote Wellness?"

A pause, while they decided whether to reveal their top-secret plans to me.

"It will recommend Yoga studios in your area. We've partnered with several popular chains and arranged great discounts. Of course, we also take a percentage. And the app will recommend great equipment that you can buy!"

"Right... So this £15 wearable wrapped in £200 of gaudy jewellery is just a vector for you to sell yoga supplies?"

A polite chuckle.

"Not at all! If we detect that you are stressed, we can recommend NLP Podcasts which you can buy with in-app purchases. If your sleep cycle seems off, we can sell you a detox juice which is delivered through your letter-box. If your period is irregular, we'll send you some healing crystals which you can wear with your Fronk-Band."

"Does any of this work? Is there any evidence for it?"

"It makes them feel like their Wellness has improved!"

"So, to recap. After buying this overpriced piece of tat which makes no claims as to its accuracy, you'll tell women all the ways they are broken and then sell them irrelevant Wellness solutions?"

"We feel that Women want to improve their Wellness. And often, they don't even know that they have poor Wellness!"

Very little of this conversation was embellished. The product is genuinely under $25 from Alibaba, the company have set it in some fairly expensive jewellery, written an app, and set up a whole raft of deals. All very impressive - but somehow deeply depressing.

The underlying assumption of this, and many other start-ups is that Women Are Broken. That their feelings are fundamentally negative and that purchasing faux-solutions is a sensible way for them to manage their lives. And if the woman doesn't think she's broken, make up some flaws and constantly remind her of them.

It's little better than going to a "psychic" who tells you that you are cursed and - coincidentally - can be cured for a very reasonable fee.

There are two fairly serious points I'd like to make in this otherwise lighthearted piece.

1. Start-ups can't be trusted with health data. Seriously, if Dropbox can't keep your passwords safe, do you want to trust the intimate details of your life to a loft in Shoreditch?
2. Women aren't broken. Preying on people's fears, creating new neuroses, and selling a fix is a scuzzy way to make a living.

Or, as Mitchell and Webb put it:

Get About A Minute as soon as each episode goes live. Stick this Podcast Feed into your podcatcher Or you can Subscribe on iTunes

Intro music "Gran Vals" performed by Brian Streckfus. Stopwatch Icon by Ilsur Aptukov from The Noun Project.

This podcast is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

We all nodded dutifully - and applauded the women who had pushed back the boundaries of science and science communication.

All was going well, until one of the presenters displayed a slide talking about gender-specific toys. In amongst the chemistry sets, Lego, and computing toys, was this monstrosity:

There was a collective intake of breath. Is this what people want for their daughters? Not to be the next Madam Curie, but merely to be Mrs Mopp the office char?

As a society, do we stifle ambition at birth by saying to girl children "Cleaning is the profession for you, m'dear!"?

I'm not so sure. Children like imitating adults and adult work. While it's true that most of the cleaning toys are associated with girls, there are some aimed at boys.

If a child wants to imitate what their parent are doing, should we prevent that?

We also have to accept that some people will become cleaners. There's nothing shameful about doing honest and useful work. Not everybody gets to be an astronaut.

It was the psychologist Stephen Pinker, I think, who coined the phrase "the how to be a human kit". We tell children stories and give them toys which socialise them into our world. Toys which are meant to teach the virtues we value in society. Cleaning is a social good. We need people to make life nice and tidy.

Finally, how do you create a child's toy that represents some of the more aspirational careers? It's easy to make a doctor's uniform - but what does "My First Web Design Toolkit" look like? There's no "Junior Lawyer" toys, nor "Petro-chemical Engineering Starter Kits" that I know of.

That said, I'm fully behind Pink Stinks' campaign against the rigid genderisation of children's toys. We have to be careful not to stifle children's imagination and potential.

I guess what I'm trying to do is find where the line is between "You're only good enough to be a cleaner" and "You can do anything you want - including being a cleaner."

This is further complicated by the power dynamic between domestic servants and their employers. The French psychologist Pascale Molinier wrote a wonderful paper which I found in The Commoner called "Of Feminists and Their Cleaning Ladies". In it she describes the tension of being a feminist and outsourcing traditional female domestic roles to other women:

... [T]he relationship with the cleaner displays a psychological tension between the desire to be served without needing to think about it – in which we find what Joan Tronto refers to as the "irresponsibility of privileged people" – and the desire to create a reciprocal link which "domesticates" this relationship.

This tension is not specific to the relationship between female employers and their domestic employees, it interrogates our relationship with care more widely, in that we all benefit from it.

P. Molinier, Of Feminists and their Cleaning Ladies: caught between the reciprocity of care and the desire for depersonalisation, Multitudes 2009/3-4, no. 37-38, p. 113-121

It was quite obvious that the audience (myself included) felt disgust at the thought of promoting domestic work as a valid career path to a young girl. I wonder if part of that disgust was cognitive dissonance around the desire to be served and have a clean environment, and the crushing realisation that necessitates the restriction of someone's ambition so that they may fulfil the role for us? That domestic work is somehow seen as a desirable form of subjugation?

That's enough feminist theory for now. I took a look at toy cleaning trolleys on Amazon and the results weren't pretty. If this blog were a Tumblr, it'd all be like:

If you look in her eyes closely, you can see all her hopes and dreams of being a CEO have been crushed under the patriarchy.

If you thought the previous trolley's colours were too gender-neutral, why not go for this stunning pink number?

That look of scepticism says "Well, that glass ceiling isn't going to clean itself, is it?"

Over time, you'll learn to suppress the bitter feelings of disappointment. Just like men have been suppressing women for centuries.

Fashion pro-tip: always, always, always match your top with your vacuum cleaner.

Of course, the female experience isn't just about cleaning. The Early Learning Centre knows women can even work on a supermarket checkout!

"Dammit, Sandra! You'll burn that top. Is it so hard to iron while I'm making important business calls?"

At least... I think that's how I feel.

Most people believe that they are rational and live up to their own ideals. But can we ever really know our own subconscious biases?

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media have released a series of study about gender biases. One of the more interesting findings was that when the male:female ratio in a group is 70:30 - both genders think the group is at parity. This is due, in part, to popular entertainment sticking almost rigidly to these gender ratios.

I honestly believe that I follow a roughly equal number of men and women on Twitter. I certainly see a lot of women in my feed. But that's just a feeling - what do the data say?

I decided to look at two different aspects of my Twitter usage.

1. How many women do I follow? (i.e. I choose to see their tweets).
2. What's the ratio of male:female tweets that I see? (i.e. if Alice tweets twice and Bob only tweets once, it's 2:1)

Limitations

The most obvious limitation is that not every tweeter is a person - some are faceless corporations. Some company accounts are definitely gendered - take Cosmo magazine for example - but I think it's easiest to separate them out.

Those tweeters who are people may not choose to reveal their gender - or it may not be immediately obvious. I don't intend asking people directly what their gender identity is.

Finally, there are many other ways I could slice this pie. I could look at race, gender, political leaning, etc - but gender is the most visible and therefore easiest to identify.

I'm basing my assessment on the user's name and their photo. In this example, I've no easy way of knowing whether @Lateral is male or female. Sorry!

I did consider using computer vision recognition and running the names through a stochastic model - but I'm off sick today so decided to manually count each follower. For something like this, the human brain is faster than installing and configuring software!

So, for this investigation, I'm dividing the tweets that I see into Male, Female, Unknown, Corporate.

Followers

As of now, I follow 1,158 Tweeters. At first glance, that's a ridiculous number. There's no way I can have any form of meaningful interaction with that many people. What that doesn't reveal is that many of those accounts are dormant or seasonal. Some, no doubt, I have no need to follow. But since Twitter killed TwitCleaner it's impractical to go through all those old accounts and remove the deadwood.

I manually looked through the 300 accounts I most recently followed. I was fairly confident that it would show want an equal opportunity tweeter I was. You're welcome to look at my Twitter friends directly, if you'd like to verify the data.

Youch. I follow more corporate accounts than women. And the M:F split? 62: 38. Not too far off the 70:30 split.

How depressing! There I was, thinking that I was breaking the mould - when instead I am, basically, a little better than average.

Because Twitter doesn't let me retrieve all my followers at once, I had to split my research into batches of 300. After looking at my 600 most recent friends, I was even more depressed.

Exactly the bloody same ratio! True, some of the corporate accounts are likely to be run by women... but I think that's just clutching at straws.

I think the m:f ratio here is interesting because it's accounts I've chosen to follow. For some reason, my brain only finds women about half as worthwhile following as men. I think that's troubling.

After going through all 1,158 accounts I follow (I was off sick today - what else was going to fill my time?) here are the final results.

Oh. Em. Gee. Honestly, I didn't fiddle the data - take a look at my friend list. But that's a Male:Female ratio of exactly 70:30.

I've gone from thinking I was a new wave feminist man to realising I'm just part of the patriarchy. Ok, maybe not that dramatic, but I honestly thought that I was following a much more gender balanced crowd than that.

I may not be following lots of women - but perhaps I'm seeing lots of their tweets?

What Do I See

Of course, these women could be tweeting a lot more than the men. And, perhaps, men could be retweeting a lot of women.

Perhaps.

Twitter's tools only let me download the last ~800 Tweets I've seen. Twitter have no interest in letting you travel further back in time than that, which is a shame. Today - a Monday - that's around 4 hours worth of Tweets. Normally I don't read them all, nor do I scroll back extensively through my timeline to catch up on what I've missed.

With more time - and a more cooperative Twitter API - I could take a look through the last month. But it is what it is.

No need to grab a pocket calculator. That Male:Female ratio is stuck at a stubborn 72:28.

I've no way of knowing how representative a sample this is. Obviously the ratio will ebb and flow depending on the time of day and what's happening in the world. I could also de-duplicate the results and try to find out how many unique voices I hear.

Thoughts

Firstly, these data are really only representative of me. I've not included anyone else in this investigation.

Secondly, it's really important to take an impartial look at your own behaviours. I would have sworn up and down that I followed a a better ratio than 70:30.

Thirdly, there are many different ways to measure bias. For example, looking at who people retweet - although, even by Twee-Q's measure I'm still a 70:30 guy.

Fourthly, men and women both use Twitter in roughly equal numbers - so I can't blame the platform for my performance.

We can't control gender equality in politics, TV, education, or employment - but we can control the number of distinct voices we choose to expose ourselves to.

Take a moment to look at your social circle - whether it's online or not - and see if you could make some adjustments to increase your daily dose of diversity.

In the meantime, here's a funny video with Geena Davis.