What exactly does 'not being empowered to talk' mean in a place where no one can really tell anyone's gender and everything is online?
I'm just taking your word you're a woman and you have as much opportunity to post or reply as anyone else.
I'm just taking your word you're a woman and you have as much opportunity to post or reply as anyone else.
There appear to be no women on the leaderboard. The leaderboard lists 100 names. The top of it is stable, but, my understanding is that your name drops off of it if you are inactive for X amount of time. The bottom is not stable. Names appear and disappear. So there are likely something over 100 members with enough karma to qualify for the leaderboard, at some points during the year. I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.
I posted a question or two trying to find out who was female here. Some women created accounts in order to reply. So, there appear to be a lot of women who lurk and read but do not feel comfortable participating.
I ended up gathering some objective data to the best of my ability because the social piece is pretty opaque here. I did not have an agenda initially. But I was experiencing a lot of friction and there was soft social evidence suggesting I was "prominent" for a woman here at a time when I had something like 3000 or 4000 karma. I put that data on my blog. For example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...
I can't prove any of this. If you want to be pedantic, hey, you win. But as a woman who ended up inadvertently researching how prominent I was because I was having what I felt was an excessive amount of friction for a "nobody," my opinion is that a) HN is not very welcoming of women and b) it has gotten better over time and is continuing to improve.
Do with that opinion as you wish. I don't feel like getting dragged into some stupid argument where multiple men verbally beat on me while swearing women don't face challenges here. Such situations never seem to strike the multiple men engaging in the pile on as either ironic nor as de facto evidence supporting my assertion that there are issues.
> I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.
Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?
> I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard.
Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?
I phrased that very carefully and it is factually correct in the way it is phrased. No, I do not know the gender of all members.
Like I said, if you want to be pendantic, whatever. But, yes, I can know for a fact that I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I sure as hell know for a fact that I am thousands short of the leaderboard. That last detail is very easily checked.
I am not sure I understand your point here, but if I do not care who writes the post, the only information that would leak the gender is the comment itself, and I do not think that one could reliable deduce the gender of a commenter by inspecting the comment (considering the comments in most HN discussions). Sure there might be discussions where this is possible, but I do not believe that this is the case for most of HN's discussions.
And they very well might decide that they don't want to spend their free time attempting to talk to people who they can't communicate effectively with because of some combination of the above. Feeling like you're one of the only people who understands your experiences in a community really sucks.
Yeah that might be true. It is just hard for me to imagine why a non-male might be inhibited to comment on e.g. the current dtrace discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12806941)? Obviously this is cherry-picked, and there _was_ (and _is_) discrimination against women in the tech scene, but I would have guessed that HN is a positive example and I rarely stumble across discrimination here.
Perhaps you should go and actually read some of the stuff on my website that I have given you several links to already before continuing to argue here. I have written probably thousands of words already on my blog about the situation on HN and I am pretty even-handed and not all man-hating or man-bashing. I strongly suspect that the fact that I fundamentally like and respect men generally is germaine to my ability to a) get upvotes here and b) critique the forum without just being thrown out on my ear.
But your behavior here is really problematic. And it is this kind of behavior that discourages a lot of women from participating.
I am a woman. You refuse to take my word for it that women experience things differently. I didn't even expect you to take my word for it. I gave you links to supporting data. You do not appear to have done me the courtesy of reading any of that before jumping back in to continue to assert that I must simply be wrong because people on HN are so nice or something.
This is really, really frustrating behavior for a woman to deal with and we face it constantly at every turn.
Please do read the links you were given and, if you still have questions after that, come back and ask more informed questions later.
Thanks.
I read your blog post, but I am unsure how the content is related to our discussion (the assumption that women get responded differently here).
> But your behavior here is really problematic. And it is this kind of behavior that discourages a lot of women from participating.
Just for clarity, can you point out which behaviour of myself discouraged women from participating here? Please understand that you made a pretty strong accusation here.
As I do not think that I made a statement in this discussion, that is off-putting to women, let's just agree to disagree (about the assumption, that women get responded differently here).
A woman posting under a throw-away account explained why she does not post as openly female on Hacker News. In part, she said:
Whenever a female posts, you put away the boxing gloves and take out the kid skin gloves.
And it provides a link to the source material where that was said: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1828289
The other link provides the raw data I dug up concerning "prominent" female names and how their karma compares to that of "prominent" male names. The difference is quite stark and dramatic.
I did not say you made any statements that were off-putting. I said your behavior is off-putting. I presented a cogent argument backed up by firsthand testimony ("women are treated differently here -- I am a woman and here is a link to another woman testifying as to her experiences") and raw data and you continue to insist that it is simply not so without in any way addressing the substantive evidence provided to you.
It's pretty crazy making stuff and it happens to women enough that we have terms like 'mansplaining' to express the tendency of men to completely ignore all evidence and tell us what we (women) are supposed to think about our lives or something.
What you are observing is that in many communities, women are not accorded the same celebrity status than men do.
Specific to the US: society tends to idolize men for their work, more so in science and technology, but also in film, music, and television. Women are worshiped for their beauty.
Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Jack Welsh are pioneers of industry, but women, don't have the same status ascribed to them.
Women pioneers in their field have to be propped up to be used as inspirational role models for girls. Men are naturally propped up by the media.
In communities, Micro celebrities are created. Outside of communities for "traditional" women roles (cooking, being a mom, nutrition), very few, if any, are women.
Ellen Pao, Marisa Mayer, and Elizabeth Holmes have been skewered (for better or worse). In fairness,
In their own communities, and related communities, micro-celebrities gain a natural boost to (karma,reputation,skillpts).
HN, a tech community, tends to idolize pioneers of tech and creators of successful startups.
*
WRT that throwaway account:
That comment was from 6 years ago. A lot has changed since then.
The owner of that account admitted that she could not attend YC because she does not have impulse control and would cheat on her husband during those 3 months. It's hard for me not to view her perspective through a certain lens--my armchair psyche degree indicates there are issues from her past that cause her to want to sleep with other men the moment her husband is not around. She has found a maladaptive coping mechanism, which is masking the symptom, but not addressing the underlying issues. Similar to how someone with anger issues represses their anger, instead of releasing it (constructively)
Seemingly proving her (and your point) in that same thread, she said being around geeky guys would be like an ethopian being by a buffet. No way that comment would acceptable today.
(Or they could, on occasion, be like me and try to communicate with people who won't listen and occasionally burn out.)
Yeah political discussions here are not better than on reddit, but if you go to HN to discuss politics (which is a broad term in itself), you are doing it wrong. E.g. I mostly discuss tech here (this discussion being an exception), and try to be a lurker in shitty politics, economics, feminism, SV-"make-the-world-a-better-place", etc. discussions and would have assumed that many do the same.
Secondly, many men absolutely treat women "worse" than men purely because of their gender (sometimes they even think they are being accommodating to the real differences that exist).
My points where general statements, applying equally to the wider culture in IT and to the specific subset tied to HN.
Though thinking about it, I've seen that sort of blunt, obtuse language about "how men think" before, it just didn't occur to me that the "men" being refereed to was intended to include me!
Of course, since I don't identify with the behaviour described (or indeed think many non-assholes would), I rather confidently exclude myself from the set of "men" being refereed to.
In any case, here's to the idea that men tend to treat women differently from men will one day not be such a contentious issue!
The question people should ask is "what is it about Hacker News that makes women uncomfortable and unlikely to participate in? "