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Comment by thereyougo | Hacker News Reader

I worked in an office few years ago, we were mostly mens and a certain kind of (in my opinion) toxic jargon was developed there.

It might be an unpopular opinion but I do think that when men and women are at the same place the chances the environment will be come toxic is way lower.

I wonder if it will happen in online community such as HN or even /r/programming on Reddit.

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I 100% agree. For most of my undergraduate, the male-female ratio was a close to 40:60 (yes there were more women in my undergraduate maths classes than men, sample size ~400-1000). When I moved overseas to study Part III in Mathematics at Cambridge, the male-female ratio soared to about 95:5. This was the first time I was in an absurdly male dominated environment since my karate classes in primary school and I found it to definitely be more toxic. My experience thereafter has been the same: more balanced environments are healthier and less prone to toxic weeding of viewpoints.

How do you know that the males in the 40:60 class didn't feel that the environment was "toxic" in the other direction?

I don’t recall this being a problem in 4 years. Men weren’t put down or treated in derogatory ways because they weren’t women. If I try to enumerate typical toxic behaviours, it certainly wasn’t the case that any of this was systematically disadvantaging men. Contrast that with modern work environments ...

In general, diversity makes groups behave better.

Whether by age, gender, race, sexual preference, nationality, or religion, increasing diversity increases the pool of experiences and points of view.

When someone offers up some toxic behavior, it is less likely to be tolerated in a diverse group. We all have in-group attribution bias to some degree, and we find it easier to overlook transgressions in people who we view as like us.

Agreed, this is what I've noticed as well. My bachelors program in electrical engineering was about 90:10 and was noticeably more toxic than my classes with a closer to 50:50 distribution.

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