Hello, Lindy -

You only referred to gender, not "continent of ultimate origin" or phenotype, so I'm assuming that in the heat of your indignation, however misplaced, you inadvertantly typed the wrong "-ism".

I will tell you (and you'll have to stick around to learn it for yourself) that this alleged "boys club" appears to be such as an unfortunate - and I hope, temporary - result of its heritage. As you well know, this forum was spun off from the former "afterhours" space bbs, which in turn was founded as a refuge from pseudoscience on the MSNBC board. You may have noticed the preponderance of males posting to MSNBC; this BBS's "gene pool", so to speak, is a smaller sampling of that larger one, which is ulitmately an artifact of a general dearth of women with interests in scientific topics - regrettable, but not our fault. There is, I daresay not even a perceptible undercurrent of gender bias on the part of the regulars here - certainly not in terms of who's welcome and who isn't. I, for one, might wish that you had used some other content as your intial volley - but that is a matter of personal opinion, has no relevance to anyone but me, and is certainly not based on how many X chromosomes you have. You may also have noticed that I advocated no censorship, merely a relocation to a more appropriate forum.

I hope you become a thoughtful, regular contributor. Attention to civility, you will find, is a large portion of anyone's welcome here.

E'