Ask HN: How often women read HN? Participate? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How often women read HN? Participate?

21 pointssushirain24 comments

I read it pretty often and have a comment history going back a number of years. Most of the time my gender isn't something that comes up. I wish I could say this place has improved in terms of how it feels to be women identified here, but I personally don't really feel like it has. It hasn't gotten worse, which is a credit to the community given how many other ways HN feels like it passed eternal September a long time ago.

I will note that some of the work I've done under nyms has hit the front page here and it was disheartening to see across hundreds of comments how many people just assumed whoever was behind the project was a guy. It was rare for anyone to be gender neutral and that was as radical as it got. No one assumed the author of that project was a woman.

Oh well.

I expect that not very many women will out themselves in response to your question, considering how much negative attention such an outing often results in.

What are you talking about? Can you cite an example?

I suspect he means on the internet in general. If you find it hard to believe I'd point you toward #3 at http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/10/30/5-facts-abou...

Quick example from [1]:

"After sifting through near to three million pull requests submitted on GitHub, they found – against their expectations – that code written by women was approved at a slightly higher rate than that composed by men, 78.6 percent to 74.6 percent, respectively. That’s roughly an extra 120,000 pieces of code.

"Nevertheless, there was a depressing caveat: this rule only applied if their gender was unidentified. If female coders’ gender was known, their overall pull request acceptance rate fell from 78.6 percent to 62.5 percent. This appears to suggest that women may in fact be better coders, but are automatically discriminated against simply because of their gender."

Apart from that, there are endless examples of women being harassed, stalked, assaulted, and even killed because of their gender. Is it any wonder that many might prefer not to reveal their gender and enjoy the benefits of relative equality when they have the ability to do so, such as in an online forum like HN?

Really, you'd have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the existence of sexual harassment. Just on HN, articles about it float to the front page at least one or twice a month, which is why I really have to wonder if you are just trolling by asking that question.

[1] - http://www.iflscience.com/technology/women-are-seen-better-c...

How much did the male approval rate change from unknown-male to known-male?

You can't just say that women's contributions fell and then not show the comparable male change.

From the study[1]:

"For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong."

Yours is a good point, however, that seems to have been missed in the reporting on this study. The men's acceptance rates did also drop (significantly even) when their gender was revealed. So it appears that men might also benefit from having a gender-neutral identity.

[1] - https://peerj.com/preprints/1733v1.pdf

Correlation != causation. Might it be possible that women who play the woman card are not as capable as those who let their code speak for their ability?

>women may in fact be better coders

How can someone make such a blanket statement like that with so many confounding variables. Do you think it possible that funding sources and expected (and socially acceptable) results might have something to do with the conclusion these sorts of studies come to? Do you think there are grants available for researchers who would interpret this data differently?

Another simple theory is that introverted women may be better coders than both extroverted female and male coders.

That's not very comparable. People who reveal their gender online are a very specific set. Not many people (male or female) reveal their gender online.

On online sexual harassment: The women who are in the spotlight are normally harassed for their political beliefs (which they are very flamboyant about), not for their gender. People who air out their political beliefs publicly are harassed whether they are a males rights activist, feminist, conservative, etc.

One trick I find helpful is reversing the results of a study and seeing if I still believe it.

This article leaves one with the impression that women are 'better' at coding. So, using the above trick, do i believe men are 'better' at coding than women? Nope. Nor do I believe the opposite. So on that basis alone one should be very skeptical about this link.

I was referring specifically to this site. Outside of reddit and maybe youtube comments I don't remember seeing any offensive comments lately. Maybe it's time to move to some better sites!

No, I'm not trolling you.

Wait, people are still flogging politiczed misinterpretations of this study? IIRC, this study found that under the majority of circumstances women are treated better than men on GitHub; you have to hunt around for an obscure corner of it to find anything that doesn't support that. So of course that's what the media did, and it looks like you fell for it.

Also, the request was for examples of sexual harassment on HN, and I can't help but notice that you didn't provide any and instead changed the subject.

Yep. Bringing up your gender on the Internet, even just matter of factly to correct someone's assumption is a quick way to find yourself and whatever point you were making derailed.

I don't hide, but I also don't bring it up much and my name being pretty gender neutral probably avoids a lot of frustrating moments.

Even for an "Ask HN" question that explicitly asks if they are female? In that case, negative attention makes even less sense as it is the point of the discussion.

Maybe someone should set up a comprehensive census for HN?

Note: I do not mean someone should set up a page long google form that asks for age and gender. I mean someone who has at least a small amount of experience with census' should set up a detailed and lengthy census which asks questions with nuance. I don't think I have the capability to do this, or I would.

My wife reads it quite a bit. She isn't a tech, but she likes seeing what we all say about stories so we can talk about it later

It is a product/platform/community's failure if you even have to ask such a question. Remember the days when "a/s/l" used to be common like "lols" or "IMHOs" of today? Well, nobody cares about gender, age or location. But these attributes make all the difference in how one communicates, and how communities (authentic communities) are formed anywhere.

I read it every day but I had not commented until now

Who in the actual fuck cares if it is a man or woman reading and participating?

I read it every day and comment once in a while.

I also post links sometimes, not often.

For Russians - m Russian - it's clear from my name that I'm a girl. not sure about non Russians.

how often do people read hn? that is how often women do.

A poorly posed question. I assume the OP meant to ask how much of HN readers are women.

daily

Every day.

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