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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

Social stuff is complicated and one of the things that keeps oppressed groups oppressed is the fact that the rules are de facto different for them. So if you really want change, you need to somehow account for the fact that generic invitations won't be seen as "We really are actually inviting you, too" by some members of some groups.

Is that any clearer for you? Because I don't think it's a rant at all.

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It isn't clear. Women are not 'oppressed', especially not in the tech industry. Far from it indeed. The only way I've seen the rules be different for women is that there are lots of events, funds, trainings and jobs specifically reserved just for women.

Given this long history, I would assume from the headline on this page that men are either not allowed to apply or are strongly discouraged from doing so (like a group of men turning up at a "women in tech" event would be)- and if that isn't the case then Stripe are surely giving a very misleading impression.

Yeah, that's why I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN (under a different handle): Because women are so fully integrated into the tech world.

One name out of more than over 100 over the years. That's dramatically worse than the figure I have repeatedly seen of 17 female CEOs out of every 100.

Edit: Don't get me wrong, I love HN. But the idea that there is no sexism in tech is laughable.

Given how many people post under pseudonyms how do you know you're the only woman who spent time there? That's a huge presumption isn't it?

Anyway, let's imagine it's true. Nothing keeps women away from Hacker News. They aren't discouraged or told HN is a "site for men". Despite that, they exclude themselves:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16159808

"Leap: an online community for women"

If you really think society has a problem with sexism amongst men you are clearly seeing what you want to see. Men build things that are for everyone. Women build things that are explicitly labelled as being "for women".

That's a huge presumption isn't it?

Nope. I usually qualify the statement, as I did above. In this case, I wrote that I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of HN. At other times, I use the framing openly female member.

It's based on data collection and on the fact that claiming to be, for example, the highest ranked openly female member for the past 2 or 2.5 years has not resulted in substantive evidence to the contrary coming to light. So far, no one has come forward to state "I (or X person) post as openly female and I have more karma than you/ I'm on the leaderboard" or similar substantive rebuttal.

I just get comments like yours asserting that I can't know that for certain, never mind that I typically carefully qualify the statement. Given how often individuals like you try to shoot me down and the fact that this is a huge group of pedants, I strongly suspect the lack of real evidence to the contrary confirms it.

So I'm pretty confident that my qualified statements on this are accurate.

There are people on the leaderboard who give out little or no personal info. I allow for the possibility that one of those individuals could be female. Even so, they don't post as openly female. I do.

If there are women on the leaderboard hiding their gender, to my mind, that only lends more weight to the assertion that sexism is an issue. Men here do not feel compelled to hide their gender and never get told they "should," a thing I have been told more than once.

For the record, I am not a member of Leap currently. I think it unlikely that I will become a member.

lack of evidence is not evidence

youre making up rationalizations for a infinite number of reasons why someone is not "openly" female, whatever that means and as if you browsed the history of all top posters

you dont know who is male or female with usernames and why would anyone really care to correct you on a claim like that for a site where the points are meaningless?

> Given how many people post under pseudonyms how do you know you're the only woman who spent time there?

DoreenMichele had never claimed to be the only female to spend time here, she claims to be the only (open) woman to have spent time on the HN leaderboard (under a previous handle), which seems a pretty solid claim.

> That's a huge presumption isn't it?

Well, in the absence of history of the leaderboard and obsessive monitoring of everyone's posts who had ever been on it it might be a bit of a presumption, but it's not a huge one; the nature of the leaderboard is that people on it are naturally fairly visible in their posting.

Now, it could be that the other prominent participants who are women are just extra careful to avoid indicating their gender, but while that's different than them not being here, it didn't actually make her point about HN any less valid if true.

> Nothing keeps women away from Hacker News. They aren't discouraged or told HN is a "site for men".

Not in so many words, sure, but if you haven't seen that subtextually, you are missing a lot.

> If you really think society has a problem with sexism amongst men you are clearly seeing what you want to see.

If you think it doesn't, you are seeing, well, very little of society, or through badly distorting lenses.

> Nothing keeps women away from Hacker News. They aren't discouraged

No, this is incorrect. HN is fucking horrible sometimes, and it's not surprising that people feel excluded by that.

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