Ask HN: What percentage of HN regulars are Women?

6 points·RoadieRoller··3 comments

Google search of "Hacker" mostly brings men or their stereotypes and most people stay away because of the negativity around the term. So, I would like to know how many women techies really understood that "Hacker News" has nothing to do with hacking and are regulars to HN.

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This is old and things have changed substantially since I wrote it, but it is the only repository of raw data on the topic that I know of:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat...

In the last year or so, I have noticed a big uptick in old handles that were inactive for a long time now participating and self identifying as female. I have long seen evidence that a lot of women here actively downplay or hide their gender. Historical surveys have suggested that 2 to 3 percent of the membership was female, but I believe that figure to be low because of self reported behavior of women hiding their gender. But women appear to be coming out of the woodwork these days.

I hit the leaderboard in October under a different handle. I appear to be the first openly female member of the leaderboard.

I feel there has been a lot of positive change in the last few years.

How do you expect anyone to determine this? Not everyone conveniently mentions their gender in their profile.

True, no denying that. I wasn't thinking of snooping into their profile details. I was mostly thinking about - women quoting HN during technical discussions inside their company, present their startups to YC and stuffs like that.

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