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Comment by killercup | Hacker News Reader

This is as suprising as the amount of comments assuming the nurse is female.

Edit for those who just comment after reading the headline: The article clearly states the nurse is Matthew W. and uses the he pronoun in the following sentences.

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In Germany, at least three quarters of nurses are women from what I would guess. So if you actually want to take a bet, betting on them being a woman makes you at least three times as likely to be correct as other bets.

Edit: first source I could find says that in 2007, 86% of nurses were women in Germany:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krankenpfleger#Besch%C3%A4ftig...

There's no need to take that bet if you can instead just read the article, however. No idea why you bring up a German statistic.

It’s to point out that people are basing their bias in reality.

Articles are mostly a jumping off point for conversation, some people just go by the headline or the comments on the page.

No more surprising than people assuming that a "plumber" is usually male.What are you trying to imply here?

I'm implying they did not read the article.

More importantly, you’re implying that it’s not surprising that people don’t read articles whose titles they’re commenting on. (I don’t disagree.)

The HN FAQ writes about better and more respectful ways to behave when you think that somebody hasn't read the article. This is not Reddit, and many of us are here _because_ this is not Reddit.

At the time of writing, you mean all of two comments got the gender wrong. Not _that_ surprising. Of course, people not reading the articles before making a comment is common anywhere.

As other comments have suggested, in most places you have ~90% female nurses, so it would be a reasonable assumption for somebody that didn't read or skimmed.

It's a reasonable assumption, considering that 90% of the nurses in the US are female.

But why make the assumption at all? 90% or not, in this case it was wrong.

That's true -- maybe they merely skimmed over the article. That's the kind of info I'd probably miss when just skimming over something, too.

If you condition on having read the article, you would know it’s a male nurse:

“ Matthew W., a nurse at two different local hospitals, said in a Facebook post on December 18 that he had received the Pfizer vaccine”

Nurses make really good money in the United States. And it is always in demand.

With the union rules and all the mandatory overtime, they can earn well over six figures.

The salaries are easily comparable to some senior software engineering salaries. And they can reach that level a lot faster than some engineers can. They can also work at multiple hospitals, to further boost their income.

Given all that, it’s reasonable to assume that some men will enter the profession also.

Not sure what you're referring to. The amount of comments using a personal pronoun to refer to the nurse, at the time of your posting, is one.

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