Joke Tech-poll: Are Computers Men or Women?

[ahihihi...]

language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine.

"House" in French, is feminine -"la maison," "Pencil" in French, is masculine "le crayon."

One puzzled student asked, "What gender is computer?" The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary.

So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun.

Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation.

The men's group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender ("la computer"), because

No one but their creator understands their internal logic
The native language they use to communicate with other computers is incomprehensible to everyone else
Even the smallest mistakes are stored in long term memory for possible later review
As soon as you make a commitment to one, you find yourself spending half your paycheque on accessories for it.
The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine "le computer") because:

In order to do anything with them, you have to turn them on.
They have a lot of data but still can't think for themselves
They are supposed to help you solve problems, but half the time they ARE the problem
As soon as you commit to one, you realise that if you had waited a little longer you could have gotten a better model.

[NicAx64]

computers are for every human beings buddy. If you are a girl then you are a subclass of human , then you are already welcomed to
learn , teach and contribute to the computing technology. My mother
is also a electronic engineer so your answer to this question is girls
also should learn , teach and contribute to the computing technology.

if you are not using the technology in the Meet weappon or drug alcohol no matter about you being a girl or a boy. Take it easy. I can see there are millions of femail contributors all around the
open source communities.

however , I am a single person and I never wish to have a girl friend before I finish atleast my MSC. So I'm inexperienced on that case , but have big talks. So in the family life I think man should be
the leader . In the family life it's different from technology, in technology yes there are female leaders . Look at the daniweb community too, think how many female persons are top contributors ? Don't mix up the lives , really my mother is good in this case . she never mix her family life with her technology life.

[MosaicFuneral]

The gender should simply be considered neuter, and life goes on while the soulless machines drone, but no-one likes it that simple... In Latin based languages, the worker is exclusively/traditionally male and a computer being something that does nothing more than complete a task - you could consider its grammatical gender to be masculine.

[NicAx64]

and life goes on while the soulless machines drone,

I think there are another 2.5 year technological and economical time period to be computers to be powerful thinking machines. Not
very far future. Anyhow it's not the time period that man needs
to simulate the full functionality in the brain.

be patient , we'll see what kind of gender characteristics are in
machines. The answer will mostly decided by random mathematics.

[Dani]

This isn't a philosophical question at all. It's actually quite cut and dry. Computers are female because they have female ports. Cables and peripherals, likewise, are male.

[jephthah]

ha.

but unfortunately, language gender has about zero correlation to anything remotely related to physiological gender, even stereotypical traits.

i wish it did, it sure as hell would make learning a foreign language easier for me.

[NicAx64]

This isn't a philosophical question at all. It's actually quite cut and dry. Computers are female because they have female ports. Cables and peripherals, likewise, are male.

Oh come on ! we are not here to start another male f email war ,
Now this is 2009 and it's totally agreed that femail and mail have
the equal thinking and brain abilities.

But what I can see there is a real difference between them.I wonder
why most of the female ppl are afraid to computers ? Most of them are
using Microsoft windows. And when I offer them a Knoppix CD they
even refused to just boot from that live CD. and when I suggest them
about a open source project instead of using visual C++ they totally
refused .so now we are doing a VC++ project as our group project.
(my group has 2 boys and 6 girls ).And in the subjects like computer architecture , operating systems always boys won the first prize.
and in the subjects like maths I math II and chess they never give
us the first prize. So that says even they are genius they really
hate the computer and deal with it. when we there is a bug , they
always prefer to use source code level debugger instead of assembly level debugger. and I don't know why. Even most of girls
don't like C and assembly and they want to keep C++ and java.
First they suggest java finally we all agree to C++. so that's clear
that most of the girls don't like to dig into the computer , but they
like it as a complete black box.

there was a quiz in our uni asked what would you buy if you got 500$ prize voucher ? , well statics showed that most of boys
mentioned new computer , mac mini , project board like things . But
girls have mentioned juwalery ,shopping , moto bike etc .

so as my idea even femail and male have the equal brain abilities ,
femail ppl thinks the computer as a complete black box and they only try to implement the solution , but male person wants to dig
into it , learn about linux + hardware and how the os working.
However to learn linux + hardware need the math skills , then I wonder why girls hate then when they already got these skills ?

[VernonDozier]

Most of them are
using Microsoft windows. And when I offer them a Knoppix CD they
even refused to just boot from that live CD. and when I suggest them
about a open source project instead of using visual C++ they totally
refused .so now we are doing a VC++ project as our group project.
(my group has 2 boys and 6 girls ).And in the subjects like computer architecture , operating systems always boys won the first prize.
and in the subjects like maths I math II and chess they never give
us the first prize. So that says even they are genius they really
hate the computer and deal with it. when we there is a bug , they
always prefer to use source code level debugger instead of assembly level debugger. and I don't know why. Even most of girls
don't like C and assembly and they want to keep C++ and java.
First they suggest java finally we all agree to C++. so that's clear
that most of the girls don't like to dig into the computer , but they
like it as a complete black box.

You have two boys and six girls in your group. You're generalizing way too much. If anything, the fact that girls outnumber boys by a 3 to 1 margin goes against your idea that girls are afraid of computers. Maybe these particular girls happen to be really good at Visual C++, C++, and Java, and not so great at Linux, Assembly, and C. It could have nothing to do them being female. And how does preferring to program in Java and C++ mean that you think of the computer as a big black box?

[ndeniche]

actually, computers are neither men nor women... they're machines, so... where am i supposed to place my vote?

[GrimJack]

The original computers were women (in the most part because the men were off to war).

Human computers played integral roles in the World War II war effort in the United States, and because of the depletion of the male labor force due to the draft, many computers during WWII were women, frequently with degrees in mathematics. In the Manhattan Project, human computers, working with a variety of mechanical aids, assisted numerical studies of the complex formulae related to Nuclear fission. And because the six people responsible for setting up problems on the ENIAC, the premiere general-purpose electronic digital computer built at the University of Pennsylvania during WWII, were drafted from a corpus of human computers, the world's first professional computer programmers were women, paving the way for careers in data processing as socially acceptable for women in an era of gender roles. (These six computers-turned-computer-programmers were Kay McNulty, Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Fran Bilas.)

Following World War II, the NACA used human computers in flight research to transcribe raw data from celluloid film and oscillograph paper and then, using slide rules and electric calculators, reduce it to standard engineering units.

[GrimJack]

actually, computers are neither men nor women... they're machines, so... where am i supposed to place my vote?

The question is wrt Romance languages that have no 'neuter'; all nouns are either male or female - as in the table or the salt in French are:la table or le sel but in Spanish :la mesa la sal or in Portuguese: a mesa o sal

[NicAx64]

You have two boys and six girls in your group. You're generalizing way too much. If anything, the fact that girls outnumber boys by a 3 to 1 margin goes against your idea that girls are afraid of computers. Maybe these particular girls happen to be really good at Visual C++, C++, and Java, and not so great at Linux, Assembly, and C. It could have nothing to do them being female. And how does preferring to program in Java and C++ mean that you think of the computer as a big black box?

yes that's my group. However our uni have 50% 50% boys and girls.

I don't tell that using a tool like C++ or java to make your things
easy is wrong . I talking about the interest that wanna to dig to
the hardware and operating systems . Yes I do say many girls are like this but there are different types of girls too.me as a boy didn't understood girls completely. I say I don't know at least 5% about them even.

[sneekula]

Computers are definitely female, here are the male reasons:
1) Most men who have one don't understand them.
2) Amongst themselves they talk in an incomprehensible language at high speed.
3) You need to tell them every trivial thing you want from them.
4) All of a sudden they refuse to cooperate, and you can't figure out what you did wrong. They refuse to give you any meaningful error message.
5) You always have to buy new stuff for them.
6) If you keep a computer for too long it becomes old and you will constantly wish you could just dump it somewhere.

[steven woodman]

Definitely female:

I can try to pick them apart all I want but I'll never truly understand whats going on in there.

[Lardmeister]

I just checked my notebook computer and just about all the ports are female ports.