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Comment by protomikron | Hacker News Reader

> You do not have to give a fuck who writes comments to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves.

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.

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The issue isn't that people think "hey, woman, I'll treat her differently". The issue is that people with different experiences will communicate in different ways, hold different priorities, and they'll react differently to the same stories and comments.

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.

> 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.

HN is a positive example. See my comments here: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/01/before-hn.ht...

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.

> 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 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).

The first link provides supporting evidence of my statement that "women get responded to differently here and report that it is problematic" as that post starts with the following:

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.

Let me propose theory as to why women are treated differently on HN, specifically why prominent women have less Karma.

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.

My theory: micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-gray-zone.html and let's leave her sex life out of this.

Maybe. On the other hand, most people lurk and read a lot before signing up for forums, and they're more than likely going to come across one of the many political discussions on here, which are... slightly less meritocratic. They could keep to just discussing tech here and pretend the politics don't exist, or they could go find other communities where they're more likely to get along with people.

(Or they could, on occasion, be like me and try to communicate with people who won't listen and occasionally burn out.)

> Feeling like you're one of the only people who understands your experiences in a community really sucks.

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.

Indeed, except that when people are literally talking about you - which they are every time women's issues turn up on here - it's kind of hard to ignore it. Nobody is here primarily to discuss politics, but political discussions happen anyway, and having to ignore them sucks.

I don't know, I think there are two issues: first the field is very masculine, that a participant is male is the standard and rarely incorrect assumption that permeates almost every aspect of IT development. So an average woman must adjust herself in a more masculine direction to fit in.

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).

I'm discussing the specific case of women on HN.

I don't think that restriction changes anything beyond making it easier for women to appear to be manly enough, and that the instances of a user being discovered to be female are lower than the actual prevalence of females among the users.

My points where general statements, applying equally to the wider culture in IT and to the specific subset tied to HN.

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