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Comment by e0m | Hacker News Reader

Wow, after ~90 submissions there have been 0 female-identified entries :/

I'm one of the only women I know who posts here. I'm afraid it's not a particularly friendly community for women, and it does get old seeing the same stupid flamewars about gender and women in the industry and feminism et cetera ad infinitum.

>"I'm afraid it's not a particularly friendly community for women"

Anti-female, sexist, or insensitive-about-female-issue posts regularly get downvoted and flagged, from what I've seen.

The worst posts certainly get downvoted and flagged. The problem is the posts that sound reasonable but aren't. It gets tiring and somewhat depressing trying to educate people about the same things over and over again.

Perhaps people are coming here to discuss things, not to be "educated."

I certainly hope not. To me the entire value of Hacker News is being educated about things I don't understand, by people who know exactly what they're talking about.

That could be because lots of people just ignore these topics on a Web site. I'll argue in person, but it achieves nothing over the Web except to annoy me, so I pass over the comments or articles.

Not intending to talk down your comment, but some of the most annoying gender-topic discussions I see on HN are the ones of the variety "there is no gender problem in tech/on HN/online". And there's plenty of those, including flagging/deletion of threads that bring up a legitimate discussion or an under-discussed perspective of this.

The fact that this comment was downvoted with no reply is an excellent example of the unfriendliness I'm describing.

Thanks for your kind words, I'm glad I'm not the only one that's seeing this problem. I did get lots of upvotes for a comment on the "post your typical HN headline" thread a year ago, to which I sarcastically replied "Why we have a gender problem in tech [flagged]". So at least a proportion of HN users care about this.

I'm not even a feminist; in fact I'm vehemently in favor of equal treatment and opportunities but against special treatment except maybe if it's a strictly temporary measure. But at the risk of using feminist rhetoric, it's almost as if there's an invisible wall that prevents these issues being seriously treated. It's incredibly annoying. Maybe it's a US thing, I see less of it at home in Scandinavia. Europe in general is either-or, I guess.

We have our share of gender discrimination problems (going in both directions), but this particular variety seems less prevalent. I really hope this gets better over time, or that there are good ways to avoid the problem. Must be annoying to deal with when you only want to do a good job and participate on equal terms in the community.

I agree that a sizable proportion of HN users care about this stuff. It seems to be the people who check the site less often. Usually the downvotes come right away, and the long tail of upvotes comes later.

And yes, it is incredibly annoying. I would very much prefer to be talking about dependencies and package (mis)management or whatever. If the gender equality issues would go away I would be quite glad to never mention them again.

And you're surprised by this? I've worked with maybe ~50 engineers directly, and 4 of them were female.

there's probably a bit of sampling bias

After 500+ submissions there are ~10 female-identified entries (~2%).

There are also entries from people who identify as space lizards and attack helicopters, so I wouldn't consider anything in that field to be of value to anyone.

You're telling us the presence of joke entries somehow negates the absence of women? That logic makes no sense.

Just look at the number of flagged posts in this thread - it's obvious Hacker News can't take the concept of gender seriously. Why should the data be taken seriously?

You're implying most women submitting identify as men on the grounds of a joke entry and flagged posts.

I don't think these are related.

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