XKCD's Randall Munroe on Google+ requiring your gender to be public

One advantage of publicly disclosing information about gender is that you know it's public. It's possible to glean someone's gender from the language they use (see http://bookblog.net/gender/genie.php), meaning people who kept their gender private may be lulled into a false sense of security. Admittedly I still agree that you should always have to option to select which of your details to make public (or to limit which groups/circles this information is available to), but thought I'd chuck in a counter argument to keep things interesting.

He's making a point since this is such a frequently overlooked issue. By raising awareness, other companies and startups are less likely to make this mistake.

Jokes aside, I like to fit people into two numbers between 0 and 1, non-inclusive. The first, number A represents your gender identification, with 0 being ideally female and 1 ideally male (remember the scale is non inclusive of the bounds). The second number B represents the gender identification that you're attracted to.

So, for example:

Hetero male: A=0.8, B=0.2

Gay male: A 0.7 b 0.9, or a 0.8 b 0.7

It's a convenient way to explain gender to nerds, and remember that there are error bars on each number that vary over a lifetime.

I'm with you!

It would also be ideal, given the current sexist state of language, to add a combo box to choose if you want to be refered to as "he", "she", or, in what now seems like a distant utopia, gender-neutrally, obviously given each language possibilities. That would be so much a big step into having gender equality on the net that the fact no big social network has done it yet tells us about how misunderstood a problem discrimination and biases towards sex and gender are.

I take great offense to my culture being defined as "relentless treatment of women as objects teaches them that they are defined by the one thing that men around them want from them"

Yes some people do that, but VERY few. It's as silly as thinking that all gay men speak with lisps, yes some do and those that do are very identifiable as likely gay. Yes there is always that guy in the bar that is inappropriate with women, and he will get noticed, but did anyone bother to look at the VAST majority of men who do not engage in that behavior. These are also the same idiots who are getting into bar fights with other men. This doesn't make it acceptable but it's hardly a hallmark of my "culture". There are people who just don't respect other people in every culture.

As to being bigger and stronger, perhaps we should look to the nation of Japan and the feats its military was able to achieve with men roughly the size of north american women. Women are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to, just like smaller men are perfectly capable of defending themselves, not that they should have to. These are again averages and if you look at the deviances you'll see that there are a lot of women who are larger than a lot of men.

Also, keep in mind that a man is twice as likely to be assaulted as a woman so from a statistical perspective it is men who should be fearing for their safety as they post their gender online.

I personally think it's a good idea for Google to make the settings private but it doesn't need the invocation of chivalric myths and the slander of an entire culture for it to happen. Frankly, the idea that women can't defend themselves and we need to add privacy settings to protect them seems more to perpetuate the ideals of chivalry than feminism.