I have an androgynous name. People are frequently surprised when they meet me in person. I’ve embraced it. I enjoy telling people that my name sounds like that of a black college football player. It usually gets a laugh.

So I don’t have a problem with Google thinking I’m a gender I’m not. I don’t really see it as a potential detriment. Google sees what I like, so it’s going to show me more things like it. No complaints there. I have nothing but appreciation their using whatever data they’re collecting on me being used to rule out stuff I don’t care about, like fly-fishing¹ and landscape photography. Design blogs and anti-procrastination potions, however? Bring it.

What I do have a problem with, and believe everyone should have a problem with, is that Google is operating under an assumption that Hollywood has been peddling since inception: chicks don’t like that nerdy shit. If you like nerdy shit, you must be a dude.

But like most things Hollywood would like us to believe, a lot of chicks do like nerdy shit. Most people discover this by the time they graduate middle school. The year being 2012, this should not be so surprising. Yet the gaming industry, STEM fields and majority of popular media act as if this is crazy talk.

“Women programmers?! Girls don’t code. Plus, it would be a bad idea to hire them anyway because BABIES.”

Look, I know it’s complicated. The geek world is often perceived as a refuge for awkward young boys. A lot of guys formed their first friendships in basements and garages filled with dusty screens and rickety tables cluttered with half-finished D&D campaigns. They hung out in comic book shops, and somewhere under the bed or up in the closet they still have a few unopened booster packs of Magic cards. Girls were a nonentity in the formation of their cultural consciousness. They were a far-off thing, fantastical and alien. What girls did on their own time, that wasn’t a concern.

But you know what’s crazy? There are girls who hung out in comic book stores too! And played video games! And went to school for engineering! And work as software engineers! That person you’re interviewing for the sysadmin job in your startup? Those are boobs under her shirt, not tumors.

Lest I overstate the absurdity of these situations, I insist that this isn’t some grade school gender panic. Being mistaken for the opposite gender happens, and that in and of itself is not a problem.

The problem is, and has always been, that women’s nerdy traits are over and over again, being misappropriated as something that conflicts with their gender role, when likes and dislikes should have absolutely no bearing on gender identity at all. Women use power tools, men wear pink, little girls can play with trucks, boys with dolls, etc. But according to Google: women in tech? Ha! Go ahead, tell another one.

Even if women are the minority in a community, activity or profession (playing Magic, writing software, drinking Dr. Pepper Ten), that does not give you license to label such an activity as “a guy thing,” because you are discounting the many women who are into that “guy thing.” The same holds true for men interested in “feminine pursuits.” It is alienating, othering, exclusionary, insert sexist term here. It props up the walls we want to tear down.

You know Rule 34, right? If it exists, someone has made a porno of it. Let’s try a new rule: if the gender ratio of something isn’t 50/50, you don’t get to round up to 100/0. The minority is not zero. They exist. Stop pretending they don’t.