Have you ever heard someone refer to a particular woman in tech or CS as a genius?
- Yes59.6%
- No40.4%
453 votesFinal results
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Have you ever heard a man refer to a particular woman in tech or CS as a genius?
- Yes56.1%
- No43.9%
253 votesFinal results
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FWIW I've literally never heard this happen, even knowing women I'd describe this way myself now that I think about it, though I won't say it now or I'd bias the poll. I generally try to avoid calling people geniuses at all, but I hear it all the time about men in tech and CS
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Around my time as a postdoc, I began to realize that if a woman senior to me in my field was described as "aggressive", "arrogant", "territorial", etc., she had really amazing research and actually instead could be described as a genius... twitter.com/HadasKressGazi…
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Just for some control, have you ever heard someone describe a man in tech or CS as a genius?
- Yes87%
- No13%
177 votesFinal results
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FWIW every time I've met someone who was widely described as a genius, they came across to me as a really arrogant and narcissistic person. This is in classical music, CS and in Math (I'm sure there are exceptions: Terence Tao seems genuinely nice and is often described that way)
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I often see "genius" being used to excuse extremely bad and abusive behaviour (for a widely known example, see people calling steve jobs a genius and therefore excusing his shitty behaviour to his employees)
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I was sometimes called a genius when growing up and it always felt wrong because I didn't feel like it. And also resulted in some serious issues with my expectations for myself that caused me to struggle in later school years and university (and to some extent, today as well).
So yeah I really try to avoid using the term. Kind of like hero worship etc. I find it kind of dehumanising, and erases peoples flaws and struggles, if that makes sense.
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Right, and I think if people *are* comfortable with others calling them a genius that's basically a red flag.
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