Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN? | Hacker News Reader

Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

Hi HN,

I had a great chat today with a researcher studying different online communities, their users, and their rules.

During that discussion, it occurred to me that while HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions), it would nevertheless be interesting to learn who is hanging out here. Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics?

(This question is not affiliated with any research and is just posed to sate my own curiosity! I cannot see your votes unless you specifically comment)

Thus, dear HN user, what's your gender?

View on HN

If you haven't already, check out StackOverflow's Developer Survey. The historical data goes back to 2015.

Strangely, it looks like the 2023 StackOverflow survey opted not to collect gender among their demographics responses. IIRC, the breakdown is approximately 90% male, 5% female, 1-2% non-binary, 1-2% prefer not to answer or prefer writing their own response. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

As of the time I write this post, the current vote distribution is not exactly what you outlined but it is extremely close. Almost surprisingly so given the current vote pool is only around 70 as I write this. I would have thought it would take a larger sample size to normalize

Thanks, will do! It is not relevant for the discussions as such, but still an interesting aspect of HN to study, IMO.

The one thing I valued most about online communities at least "back in the day" was not knowing this stuff.

I could genuinely be interacting with people as persons without being biased about them. It was the great equalizer and part of what drew me towards "the hacker's manifesto".

Most of us I think fail to understand what an immense treasure of justice anonymity or at least pseudonymity is. It sucks that the modern internet financially is surviving as a result of fighting against these values.

I disagree with you about knowing people's gender's being a good thing. Look at what people say and do and get to know and then hate or like them to your heart's content. There are few places left where you can meet people and get to know them without a profile pic or a reddit post like this HN post tells you the same exact things that bias us in real life and result in so much strife and injustice.I hated places where people asked "A/S/L?" as you can tell, what do you think of petitioning to ban asking such info to the general HN audience?

Not knowing the gender (distribution) of commenters is not knowing the underlying bias in the replies of these commenters.

Thus no, such info shouldn't be banned.

I disagree, the underlying bias a person has is irrelevant if they can prove to others the correctness of what they are saying. You are wanting to put people in boxes and stereotype as if they're not capable of compensating for bias or understanding others' perspective.

If it is a subjective comment and personal experience is relevant, the commenter can disclose that detail there and then. However, where fact or analysis of information is involved, it is the correctness and quality of what is said that matters not who said it.

> I disagree, the underlying bias a person has is irrelevant if they can prove to others the correctness of what they are saying.

Which isn't the case for everything, and if it is the case, it isn't done always (most of the time).

> You are wanting to put people in boxes and stereotype as if they're not capable of compensating for bias

I am not. Capability doesn't matter if they aren't even aware of their own bias or don't care.

> understanding others' perspective.

No, relevance?

> However, where fact or analysis of information is involved, it is the correctness and quality of what is said that matters not who said it.

Even if something is correct the information they give might be selective while neglecting other perspectives because of their bias, may it be on purpose or not.

Tldr: I think you portrait people as perfectly self aware and free of self interest, which isn't the case on reality which is exactly why groups of people show biases.

It's vitally important to know the perspective from which somebody evaluates the gender wage gap when I'm reading their complaints about Node.

Eh, it's one thing to know the gender of individuals.

It's another thing to have anonymized statistics about the community.

for what purpose? Are you assuming everyone will act in good faith or should we expect a rise in people presuming others are male by default for example? Once I know the stats, it's hard to ignore.

It's not all that different when 95% are of the same gender.

Current figures:

14 non-binary

18 women (counting me)

329 men

3 prefer to self describe

364 total votes, about 5 percent female and 5 percent "other", so roughly 90 percent male.

When I joined, polls showed it to be more like 98 percent male. So non-male membership/participation has possibly quintupled in the 14+ years I've been here.

This fits with my general impression as a participant. Nice to have a little data. It's been a while since I've seen one of these polls.

> When I joined, polls showed it to be more like 98 percent male. So non-male membership/participation has possibly quintupled in the 14+ years I've been here.

I mention in a separate comment that there is strong reasons to believe this survey is unrepresentative of the HN population, but say it was representative both right now and 14+ years ago. Here are a few things worth baring in mind when making the above inference:

1. Did HN cover the same population now that it did 14+ years ago?

2. Did the survey 14+ years ago include the same options? Were participants equally likely to identify with the given options?

3. The sampling mean in both cases will have significant error. Differences ought to be outside of at least 2 standard deviations to be considered significant.

I originally joined in July 2009. HN was a lot smaller back then and demographic polls were somewhat common at first, at least comparatively. They later became less common.

There was variation in poll results, but my recollection is the variation was something like 96 to 99 percent male. At some point, I settled on a figure of "roughly 98 percent" as a good faith estimate.

I have a Certificate in GIS and a relatively strong math background for the general population, though not for HN, and I know a little CSS and HTML, but I'm not really a programmer, I'm not perceived of as "a tech person" by the HN crowd, etc. I feel I "belong"/fit but it's pretty clear to me most people feel I don't.

When I hit something like 2000 karma under my old handle -- and probably the top 3 people on the leaderboard all had about 50k at the time -- I began getting weird comments that suggested to me I was viewed as "prominent for a woman" on HN, though the bottom of the leaderboard was probably around 10k at the time.

I'm a big fat nobody in the real world and was nowhere near qualifying as having "a lot" of karma for HN and yet comments seemed to suggest people found me noteworthy. So I spent some time keeping private data to try to sort out what the heck was going on.

Those records are long lost and I'm disinclined to say too much about them publicly, but I mention them to say I did track data of some sort related to gender and HN membership for a time.

Things have changed over time and commenting as openly female is less drama for me than it used to be. There are many, many confounding factors that make it impossible to determine how much that is cultural change related to gender and how much that's somehow "me"/my relationship to the site, but I've observed that I notice openly female participants more often and topics seem to include more articles by and/or about women in a way that seems like inclusion is more normalized than it was 14 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.

The data here generally fits with my personal observations and impressions that HN is more diverse than it used to be. I don't feel it matters a whole lot if it's off by a bit. It makes little difference to me whether the "non male" demographics is double, triple, quintuple or septuple the roughly 2 percent it once was. I feel and see the difference and presumably others do too that they show up more, percentage-wise.

I commented because I'm probably the only person who has a history of tracking gender-related data on HN and I know how this goes: People see the low figures and start having fits about sexism.

I'm just trying to provide context. Yes, HN skews very strongly male. It used to skew even more strongly male according to my personal observations and polls of this sort.

FWIW.

This helps explain to me why, when there is a thread about a woman being mistreated in the workplace, there’s just loads and loads of comments dismissing the concerns and saying she’s overreacting. Quite unfortunately that’s exactly the reaction that leads to those problems persisting.

I have no idea how this helps explain that to you.

I’ve spent enough time at places like google and spoken to other women about how they are treated by men in those workplaces to understand why I’m seeing the exact same behavior from most users here. Men in our culture are more trusting of other men and more dismissive of claims made by women, in my experience. When I see an article about a woman who was mistreated by men in her workplace and her claims were dismissed by other men, and then I see threads here filled with men dismissing her claims, everything falls in to place when I see that this place is 95% men. There just aren’t enough women’s voices here to explain what’s really happening, and the men here demographically are the same men that contribute to these problems in the workplace.

i think he's pointing out how a male-dominated culture would respond with mansplaining about one's responsibility to adapt to the workplace, where a woman-dominated culture might focus more on the emotional toll of such failing to adapt

edit: on second thought, your comment might be snarking about how a poll is unnecessary to assume that this is a male-dominated space, making me the fool

According to the profile, TaylorAlexander is a she/her pronouned person.

I was a homemaker for a couple of decades. I spent 5 years and 3 months working at a Fortune 500 company. I have since done freelance work and I'm a blogger.

I haven't spent a lot of time in "the work place" -- by which I mean heteronormative assumptions that the only real work is paid work and women's work doesn't count. My place of work for much of my adult life was my home, and not in a "work from home" sense.

Anyway, I'm not being snarky. I'm just some demographic outlier who thinks a lot about how gender interacts with societal expectations about work and my ideas about it generally fall outside the Overton Window, so I say a lot less than I used to because it tends to be pointless drama where everyone wants to accuse me of something while not seeming at all interested in what I'm trying to say.

may you continue to hold the fort and other such women's work

I'm divorced and in desperate need of earned income.

But I thank you for your well wishes.

Well first off I’m a woman. But I wasn’t talking about women focusing on “the emotional toll of failing to adapt”. I’m talking about the fact that in our culture men are more likely to trust other men than women, and more likely to dismiss the claims made by women. This directly leads to discrimination against women in the workplace. The specific ways this happen can often seem subtle from the outside, but the persistence and prevalence of this is clearly felt by women in tech. There is nothing women can do to adapt to the fact that men won’t listen to them, men need to change their behavior. Women who try to adapt by being more assertive can be labeled as aggressive and will be dismissed all the same.

Then when women make claims about discrimination in the workplace in a manner which finds its way to this website, the same men who would have dismissed them in the workplace will dismiss their claims of discrimination in comments here. This leads to an echo chamber of men saying to each other that discrimination against women isn’t happening, when in reality they just don’t see it from their position.

I once went to an AWS conference and played a game, are there more women or more blind men. After 3 days, I counted more blind men.

Nothing about the results above surprises me.

The fundamental differences between men and women aren’t a surprise.

Being a “data junkie” myself, I would also like to have access to various anonymized statistics for HN users just out of curiosity, but this isn’t possible.

See some previous posts:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986

Gender poll from 2009 seems very relevant here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=591309

About 5% women, it is interesting how little things change.

Here's the most recent gender poll made just few hours ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363

Still only 5% woman

Yes, we are in that thread which is why I said it is interesting that things didn't change much.

Sorry! My mistake. Thought I was on a different thread.

Notes on survey bias.

HN community is international and from [1] it is around 3.5M monthly unique users. A representative sample would need to be stratified since it is unlikely that — for example — the proportion of female readers will be the same across countries.

The poll would need to run for a long time since the daily and monthly unique figures are different by order of magnitude.

Further, there are many times more lurkers than posters [1], and only a fraction of posters will answer this poll (I will not, for example). I would expect something like a >99% non-response, implying strong self selection amongst responders.

The upshot will be that inference from this poll to the HN population will likely be biased.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581

I agree that this will be biased and I don't think this should be used for any serious type of survey. I was literally just interested in the results. :-)

Full demo would probably be more interesting.

If I had to guess, the vast majority are males in the 35-50 range.

> HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions)

Agree.

> Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics

How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?

people's emotions and moods are influenced by their perception of the environment, including things they see, hear, or even think about

therefore even the virtual presence of something wonderful* being in one's vicinity can have an impact on an individual's emotional state, making the environment feel more "pleasant"

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_are_wonderful

Pleasant in the sense that I'd love to see some myths about this being a 'man-only' site dispelled. Should have clarified that!

"this site just has too many blacks on it"

see how that's problematic?

Fully agree with you there! As I said, I'm merely interested in getting a rough picture of the demographics (INB4: selection bias etc.). I find the statement you mention just as problematic as if you were to switch out the ethnic identity with _any_ form (self-identified) identity. That being said, I don't see anything problematic about looking at population demographics and then asking _why_ some identities are over- or under-represented. This poll should not be used for that, though :-)

why do you use the term 'myth' ?

Maybe 'assumption' would have been the better choice. Given that HN is (for me!) broadly about playfully engaging with technology and society at large, I would expect that this _should_ attract a relatively diverse audience.

Ever since I've started seeing outright discrimination against males in tech, I've adjusted by always answering prefer not to say / other.

> outright discrimination against males in tech

I'm sure you've seen some things here and there, but truly, saying "discrimination against males in tech" is a problem is quite ridiculous.

It's vastly male dominated, so you could argue that if there's discrimination against men it's not very effective. Probably there's discrimination for and against women, and for and against men, in all sorts of ways.

But I'd bet that discrimination against hiring men into a tech position is probably the norm.

I talked with some hiring managers about this a few years ago. About 5 years ago, female devs with an undergrad degree made up less than 20% of the available hiring pool. There's a preference to hire female developers, but finding them is incredibly difficult - which is partly why there's a preference. I wouldn't call that discrimination in hiring when it's simply trying to balance a dev team that's 4/5ths males.

As of this comment, there are 465 poll votes in total, but the poll itself has only received 76 votes. Odd that most people who considered it interesting enough to participate in, did not consider it interesting enough to reward or signal-boost.

The vast majority of women I've spoken to all take the same view of tech. "you sit on a computer all day and 'write code'?! How dull!"

I'm not entirely sure that the gender discrepancy here is significantly more than reflective of gender preferences, from my very limited sample space.

This poll will have a predictable outcome. I'd rather see a poll of women on why they're not in tech - no interest, peer pressure, "boys club", etc.

Irrelevant

Well this is going to be depressing.

I prefer to self-describe as Noybu -- none of your business. ^_^

I don't care. Anybody can use whatever pronouns they want to me. Although I care about the feelings of others who may think different (so I avoid behaving in a way which might hurt them), I personally believe any (not just gender) self-identification is a pointless lie.

I voted for non-binary but it isn't exactly what I mean, as far as I know. I would rather vote for N/A, NULL, ANY or something like that if there was an option.

Can you please add furry to the options?

After ThoughtWorks emailed me saying they wouldn't hire male candidates I've decided to move on from being male.

IANAL, but if you have that in writing, it seems like you have a massive employment discrimination lawsuit just waiting for a lawyer.

All the lawyers I talked to said it sounded great and I should look for some other lawyer who's willing to do it.

I dislike their politics but this is exactly what America First Legal does

Wait, what?

Why they don’t hire males?

Mmm.. Strange, I have feeling that some faces on https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/leaders are AI generated.

Honestly curious why downvotes?

We aren’t in for a pleasant surprise. If this userbase is anything less than 70% male I’d eat my hat. Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive. But HN, being a community of old farts lamenting about the good old days (if I have to read another comment about how great it is that the site hasn’t changed in 20 years I’lll scream), as well as techno-libertarians wanting to tell you about their new startup, would IMO rightfully be subject to a fair degree of lag.

> Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive

What do you mean? It basically hasn't changed at all, the only thing that changed was the messaging but not anything significant. The ratio of women in engineering related fields like programming has been pretty steady the past 30 years.

A modern inclusion preacher begins his sermon with excluding all the groups he doesn't like, which are numerous.

> Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive

Ah yes the old and tired argument comes out again. Since there are 50% men and 50% women in the world why doesn't tech look the same?

Cool opinion though...it's so 2015. Almost vintage! I particularly enjoyed the part where you imply it's a bad thing. Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military, or any other male dominated field Dr. Inclusion?

Well, you do hear about those things (welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military).

For example, the United States Marine Corps is slowly integrating some basic training and has a few co-ed companies [1]. This was such a far-fetched idea in the 90s that Ridley Scott made a movie about it starring Demi Moore (G.I. Jane, 1997).

Firefighting is another excellent example [2]. 7-11% of firefighters in the United States are women (depending on how volunteer vs. career firefighters are counted). I remember that statistic because StackOverflow's female respondent rate hovers around ~5%. "Women are more likely to run into burning buildings than what I'm doing now" is the kind of gallows humor that gets me through the day.

There are also advocacy groups for other gender/work minority combinations, like male nurses and caretakers.

[1] https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/FOIA/Reading-Ro...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_firefighting

Edited: typos

Better examples probably would have been garbage men, roofers, welders, plumbers, etc. It's only a problem when the job is perceived to have some amount of status. No one fights over opportunities to unclog toilets or shovel fertilizer. The military has (rapidly declining) prestige, firefighting is considered exciting and heroic, etc. Then a demographic split becomes an opportunity to shake down the organization for DEI consulting and make-work sinecures.

Personally I don't care as long as any prospective firefighters can quickly carry a 200 pound unconscious person out of a burning building. For some reason, I suspect that pool of qualified candidates skews male.

> Better examples probably would have been garbage men, roofers, welders, plumbers, etc.

And... if you were following any of those fields, you'd find gender inclusion is also an issue. Tech definitely gets more attention in a tech centric forum like HN, and usually (because $$) gets more attention from the general interest press, but the issues are everywhere, with fairly similar discussions.

GI Jane was about a imaginary Navy special operations unit that was a stand in for the Navy SEALs. There are still no female Navy Seals, and it is still far-fethced except for the generally declining standards across the armed forces.

Or, conversely, for the female-dominated fields: preschool teachers, nurses, hairdressers, etc.

This whole endeavour to have equal representation of all genders in all aspects of life completely misses the mark that career choices and most life decisions are rooted in personal preferences and interests, and that on a fundamental level males and females (and other genders as well, I suppose) are different. And that this is OK.

Not only that, but it doesn't address the main issues of discrimination and wage gap, but pretends it will somehow fix itself if we maintain a perfect balance of gender representation.

And why stop there? Why focus on gender and race only? Shouldn't we also have equal representation of all nationalities, religions, hair colors, eye colors, and whatever other human criteria?

The entire DEI trend is absurd, and ironically only serves to further divide us into arbitrary buckets.

> Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military, or any other male dominated field Dr. Inclusion?

I would guess that you don’t hear it because you don't pay attention to news concerning those domains, at least as it relates to gender inclusion, as gender inclusion is an active issue in each of them.

https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/education/education-m...

https://www.achrnews.com/articles/147486-welcome-women-into-...

https://www.hsaj.org/articles/21721

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/public-safety-car...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/21/hire-fema...

https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/police-culture-and-wo...

https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/01/military-must-recr...

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/12/19/...

True crime is that effeminate males are too shy to come out of the closet...

Women are perhaps the closest distant group that gets undeserved presuppositions thinly-veiled and anecdotal pseudoscience.

The point is that most non-labor intensive jobs don't have such a hard gender preference. Without the loss of generality, my family tree of Soviet citizens were able to be chemists, engineers, doctors, and now software devs just fine. I fail to recognise what IT or playing chess is different to warrant such a huge discrepancy, something doesn't add up.

The fact that discriminating is short-sighted when it come to employment tells me of a deprecated conceptual model that I doubt can truly be resolved through fixing IT alone,

to be blunt, the problem is old because the actions are ineffective.

No need for the sarcasm and derision. Let's try to keep things civil.

There was sarcasm, but there was no derision. There's nothing wrong with sarcasm - it is a common and civil tool of communication. Sarcastically stating the fact about an bad take in someone's comment - that it is a bad take - is not derision. would you prefer dry talk completely lacking emotion? There is chat with a computer for that - you are here communicating with people.

Your take, is a bad take. Things are civil. They don't also need to look like two robots talking to an oven.

I would feel safe about making that bet with 90%...

I think it's safe to say your hat is just fine

>as well as techno-libertarians wanting to tell you about their new startup

Well uh, isn’t this the reason why this exists in the first place? We are on the subdomain of a startup accelerator.

I don’t like with most of them either, especially those that loudly complain about not being able to legally siphon my data without my consent because of the GDPR.

But we are on their turf after all.

More ground mystery meat in tube shape than a nightlight venue in Man Jose.

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