ConwayLife.com

We have a decent number of female and nonbinary members in this community, but the big names all seem to be male for some reason, and I don't know if there's a way to change this. Of course, I'm contributing to the problem by being a "big name" and male.

Let's call the "modern era" the time the forum has existed: 2009 to present. (I want this to be an actual term, not just something used in this thread.)

Before the modern era, the "greats" were all male, both at the beginning (e.g. John Conway, Bill Gosper) and in the search program era (e.g. Dean Hickerson, David Bell, David Eppstein, Jason Summers ).

Modern era, somewhat chronologically:

The two "greats" of the modern era are Matthias Merzenich and Tanner Jacobi.
I found over 200 oscillators.
iNoMed works with syntheses and often completes oscillator partials.
Luke Kiernan, Mitchell Riley, and Carson Cheng are symmetric CatForce users.
JP21 seems to have a lot of intuition regarding completions of partials (rather than using search programs). I actually consider him above me. Keep in mind he found the second known p23.
Ilkka Törmä and Ville Salo found the unconstructible still life.
Then you have the people who maintain the websites (Nathaniel Johnston, Dave Greene, Adam P. Goucher) and the Golly Gang.

All of these people are male. How do we fix that?

This seems actually pretty tricky ngl. I'm not sure that there are a whole lot of barriers that WE have control over (seeing as we're literally a chat forum with very little barriers to entry), a lot of the issues probably just come from disproportional male exposure/access to science education etcetera.

Though then again, I dunno, as you mentioned it is pretty curious how a lot of the "big names" are male, much more disproportionately than the broader community. I'm not sure why this would be? Some of the "big names" have been in academia a while, and the disproportionate male presence in academia sort of explains that, but just as many are hobbyists and I have no idea why they'd generally be more male than the general community. (Law of large numbers not being able to take effect at small scales perhaps?).

(Also, I feel like it may sort of depend on what contributions you consider "big name"-status-worthy. Like, if you really care about small quadratic growth, then Dani would be a big name. There are definitely a fair amount of contributors who aren't men. But I suppose no matter how you slice it it's still true that overall things tend to be overwhelmingly male)

hotdogPi wrote: ↑

November 2nd, 2023, 10:01 am

All of these people are male. How do we fix that?

<s>Oh, I'd recommend changing the list of people at the top rather than changing anything about the individuals at the top.</s>

I suspect that the big names are male because the big names came earlier, and CGOL was more dominated by men back then. The earliest involvement from a woman I can come up with right now is Kellie Evans' creation of LtL in the 1990s.

Begging won't help get any new members of any gender, so our best option is to continue being as welcoming as we've ever been. I believe we're doing a great job of that.

Turning a community's focus away from the actual hobby onto unrelated issues and generalities is how you take the soul out of it. (I modified a sentence from an older discussion.) This thread is not about the hobby.

For me, the actual hobby means CA patterns, CA evolution rules, anything else directly connected to Life/CA (e.g. ideas for algorithms/software to explore CA, posting completed searches (either positive or negative results), creating physical models of Life patterns, etc.)

confocaloid wrote: ↑

November 2nd, 2023, 3:50 pm

Turning a community's focus away from the actual hobby onto unrelated issues and generalities is how you take the soul out of it. ... This thread is not about the hobby.

Oh, DARN, you're right, confocaloid. I guess we ought to unlock all the actually CA-related threads threads that were temporarily locked after this thread was created so that we could discuss this issue. Mods?
... What? None of the threads were locked, and people continued to actively contribute to CA??!? But I thought the community's focus was turned away from CA while we discussed this topic, as confocaloid said, so how is it possible that—?

olivia enessemir wrote: ↑

November 2nd, 2023, 8:00 pm

so that we could discuss this issue

"Discussing this issue" amounts to failing to discuss something else, something that would actually be on-topic / CA-related and would be more likely to be interesting and could lead to something even more interesting.

olivia enessemir wrote: ↑

November 2nd, 2023, 8:00 pm

and people continued to actively contribute to CA?

This is not a yes or no thing. Some people still continue to contribute here, but often less enthusiastically now than before (in part because of the many spammish threads / low S/N ratio). Some previously active people are not active anymore.
Likewise, newcomers still appear here, but what newcomers see here today is different from what newcomers saw here a few years ago.

hotdogPi wrote: ↑

November 2nd, 2023, 10:01 am

We have a decent number of female and nonbinary members in this community, but the big names all seem to be male for some reason...

It's an interesting issue, for sure, and a very long-standing one.

I haven't seen cases of Lifenthusiasts getting actively harassed / discriminated against / insulted / discouraged / ignored based on gender, either early on in the investigation of Life or more recently. If I'm cluelessly missing some examples, please point them out -- that's certainly something I would want to know about.

The Lifenthusiast gender disparity seemed to get a very early start. Maybe this was at least partly due to a gender imbalance among 1970 Scientific American readers? Anyway, back in the early 1970s, the people who wrote in to Martin Gardner to express an interest in Life, or who ended up subscribing to Robert Wainwright's LIFELINE, were certainly disproportionately male. (I don't have statistics here, but I think that's a safe summary!) Maybe the imbalance started even earlier, with the people working with John Conway in 1969 to find a good rule to support construction universality (Conway's graduate students, plus others like Richard Guy who got drawn in to the subject).

Lifenthusiast <-> Computer Science correlation?
On the other hand, maybe the imbalance that's most relevant is the ongoing gender disparity among people involved in computer science. For people who plan on doing a lot of Life hacking, it's awfully handy to be very interested in computer-science topics. Maybe even somewhat obsessively interested. Computer-science classes and CS-related books are often where people are first introduced to Conway's Life and related CAs, as an introductory programming exercise if nothing else.

I wasn't aware of the statistics from the above link, by the way: 13.6% of computer-science undergraduate degrees went to females in 1970, up to 37% in 1984, but then dropping again to 18%. This all seems to be U.S. data -- not sure how the stats might be different elsewhere. I do know that in the early 1990s, various CS theory classes I was taking in the Engineering College at my university in upstate New York were easily over 90% male. The LifeCA mailing-list discussion group that got started around the same time had a similar imbalance -- even worse, actually.

It was never clear what exactly could be done about either of those imbalances. To some extent it can be a self-perpetuating problem -- people hang out in places where they feel comfortable, and it's hard to feel comfortable if you get a lot of attention (even from well-intentioned people) as being part of an underrepresented group. But for the LifeCA mailing-list case, there also just didn't seem to be a lot of opportunities to nominate non-males for membership. Whenever a new player appeared on the scene, it almost always "just happened" to be another male.

... Which is why, after puzzling over the problem off and on over the last twenty years, the best solution I've ever come up with basically amounts to "don't make too much noise about the problem, and hope that it gets better with time." I'm not saying that that's the right approach, necessarily, just that I couldn't ever think of anything better -- and that approach at least avoids accidentally driving anyone away by focusing an unwanted spotlight on them.

Similarity with chess
The whole question reminds me quite a bit of the disparity in chess rating between top male chess players and top female ones ... which is statistically predictable given the ten-to-one participation gap. In Life as in chess, the historically huge participation gap seems like it's completely sufficient to explain the lack of "gender equality at the top". It's not really clear to me yet whether recent trends are closing the participation gap or not.

A nice difference between Conway's Life and chess is that in chess, it's easy to find lots and lots of disparaging comments claiming some kind of innate superiority ... apparently written by people who aren't very good at statistics. I don't think anyone has bothered to try claiming that males are somehow innately better than females at building Life patterns or making Life discoveries. I haven't seen anything like that (and I hope that I continue to not see it).

dvgrn wrote: ↑

November 5th, 2023, 2:14 pm

disparaging comments claiming some kind of innate superiority ... apparently written by people who aren't very good at statistics.

i agree, dvgrn

I cannot tell. Users automatically assume that I am male as I am using this (Which I am not, but I just let it go by). Maybe all the admins, the role models are male and thats the cause of this.

YES !

and how ?

<3