---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org>
Date: Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 11:03 AM
Subject: Re: Book "The End of the Beginning" finally published!
To: gbrain@listserv.vub.ac.be


On Wed, Aug 26, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Dante-Gabryell Monson
<dante.monson@gmail.com> wrote:
> after forwarding this message about the book, I was asked why there are only
> men within the author list ?


Well, we made a web page for the book and sent out a bunch of emails
and social media announcements soliciting authors....   Adult males
were the ones who responded by sending chapters....   The author list
wasn't restricted to our chums, though many who responded were in fact
our chums...

I did make an effort to get geographical/cultural representation ...
but it happened that of the African and Asian transhumanists I
solicited, the ones who responded favorably and wanted to submit
chapters, were both young males...

So I think this really reduces to the question of why the overall
topic of the Singularity, transhumanism and advanced tech appeals to
men more than women....  When I used to organize transhumanist
conferences, recruiting one or two good on-topic female speakers was
always something I had to explicitly strive for... I generally found
men more eager to push themselves forward and advertise themselves in
this way, than women...

(Note, I am simply being empirical in the above observations, not
making any hypotheses about the causes....   But I note that when I
was working in psychology for a while in the 90s, things I organized
attracted a high proportion of females....  So this doesn't seem to be
an artifact of my or Ted's personal styles, but more of the subject
area...)

-- Ben

-- Ben