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Comment by kintamanimatt | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize how much of a sausage fest this site really is. It's amazing how much intellectual talent we're missing out on because it seems tech scares away women.

I'd actually be curious to see what kind of sexual orientation distribution there is also. I wonder if it'd fall in line with the general population.

Created: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520651

(Edit: Not sure why this poll has been killed. It was created as a serious poll to satisfy my curiosity, not as backlash! It was actually yielding some really interesting information, in particular the higher proportion of non-straight people than is normal in the general population.)

(Edit again: now been unbanned!)

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I think its important to remember that "tech" doesn't scare away women per se. People scare away women.

And I doubt its a strict sexism problem, either. My engineer friends are the most negative group of friends I have. By miles.

Criticism is great, but the negative attitudes I see among them (and here, and Reddit) upset the hell out of me, and I wouldn't be surprised if that wasn't as-big of a problem.

As a general rule smart people tend to be less happy.

Idealists (as many in STEM are) who are smart is a deadly combination. You know just how terrible the world you live in is, and no matter how hard you work you keep hearing more bad news.

Sometimes I wish my brain had an off button so I can stop reading about North Korea (or remembering how "behind" I am from my peers) and instead go watch Celebrity Big Brother or whatever is showing today.

If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared.

I'm in Europe. North Korea doesn't scare me. The only people who should legitimately be concerned are those in South Korea (and to a much lesser degree Japan).

I find international politics interesting. Fear isn't really a motivation.

> If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared.

North Korea isn't itself very scary. What is scary is the fact that over decades they have threatened to attack everyone around them, and the surrounding powers have responded by extending food and economic aid, in a repeating pattern. The North Koreans know this -- they know it works -- so they do it again and again, and their citizens remain captives of a throwback regime. That's what's scary.

It's called a low information diet. It is indeed possible.

Or you can reframe things without dumbing anything down. In spite of my currently bitter inclination, I am generally an optimist, yadda.

Sounds like they need to get laid more.*

* Yes, I am going to hell. I am also working on a comic to bleed off my socially unacceptable jokes. Sorry. I could have resisted temptation. I just chose not to. Mmkay?

If your disclaimer is longer than your joke, maybe you should reconsider telling it.

I did consider not saying it. I decided to say it anyway. Although intended somewhat humorously, I suspect the downvotes are more about hitting a nerve. But perhaps that is neither here nor there. (shrug)

Edit: Or perhaps the disclaimer is the real joke, since I mostly meant the first part.

What if I told you that I find the term sausage fest offensive and it makes me feel unwelcome in this community?

How so?

The phrase is a little crude but I see no reason for it to cause offence to any particular gender more than another.

Possibly Tichy is a vegan. Another hostile meme environment: "icanhazcheezburger"

Well, the type of sausage wasn't specified; I hear soy-based vegetarian sausages aren't all that bad.

Some people are crass, boorish, crude even. Develop some tolerance. I don't mean suffer in silence either. It's fine to let someone know how you feel. But it's not (IMO) fine to demand that everyone always cater to your extreme sensitivity. I'd personally prefer to be insulted occasionally, rather than having to walk on eggshells for fear of offending someone.

Couldn't have put it better.

What if I were a woman complaining about sexism in the industry, would you give me the same advice? Several female bloggers have complained about the "don't be so uptight" reply they received to their complaints...

Are you a woman? If so, some people are crass, boorish, crude, jerks even. That doesn't make them right, but try to develop some tolerance. I don't mean suffer in silence either. It's fine to let someone know how you feel, and you definitely shouldn't tolerate, or allow people to make you feel unsafe. But it's not (IMO) fine to demand that everyone always cater to your extreme sensitivity. And, some people are just jerks, even if you can get them to shut up it doesn't make them nicer.

If you are both a woman and crass, and the person persists in annoying you, maybe try telling menstruation-themed jokes or anecdotes. But, if you are both a woman and crass, chances are you don't need me to tell you how to rid yourself of unwanted company.

I'd tell you that in a community of 95% dudes, the welcome-ness of any given dude is a much lower priority than other things I might worry about.

I have a dream, that one day it will be rare to hold sexist perspectives like the one you just described. In my dream world, the importance of people feeling welcome is independent of that person's gender or that person's sex. I don't know what you meant to say, but what you said is that gender is among the things that you consider most important about participants, when deciding if their feelings matter.

The type of bigotry you just exhibited is way, way down the list of priorities. But most of the higher priorities are complicated and nuanced[0][1], but the thing you said is just straight-up wrong.

[0] E.g. affirmative action is complicated and nuanced.

[1] E.g. assuming a randomly-selected conventional-looking women at a tech convention is not a developer is... totally horrible, but also rational, given the distribution.

...or I was responding appropriately to an obvious troll.

But don't let me deny you your savory helping of sanctimony there.

Yeah, well, my analysis, then and now, is that you were replying inappropriately to a semi-trollish comment by someone who's probably redeemable.

And actually, if counter-trolling is how you frame your comment, then I have to say, you're doing it wrong. The correct response to trolls is to silently downvote. This is called "don't feed the trolls", and it's the right strategy because genuine trolls are encouraged by counter-trolling, and this would result in more noise and less signal. Alternately you can try to say something that will be useful to other people, while still downvoting and ignoring the troll.

> The correct response to trolls is to silently downvote.

Then what is it you've been up to here while responding to me?

Your troll strategy is tiring lectures, while I opt for a slightly more economical approach. Potato, potato.

I had you filed under "well-meaning, but mistaken", not "troll". And I prefer to call them "earnest" lectures. Potato, potato.

> What if I told you that I find the term sausage fest offensive and it makes me feel unwelcome in this community?

If you said that, if you took that position, I would strongly recommend that you do what you can to ignore those kinds of feelings.

It's my belief that women have a natural place in science and technology, but caring too much about social trivia and language (as with the recent PyCon episode) represents a pointless diversion that can only hold women back.

Would you want to be treated by a doctor who fainted at the sight of blood? I think you would prefer one who didn't care about that, who looked beyond it to something more important like a diagnosis and a cure. By the same token, people in science and technology need to be able to look beyond the petty annoyances and focus their attention on more important things.

Wouldn't it be ironic and deplorable if history recorded that an entire generation of highly skilled women didn't enter the ranks of modern science and technology because they sometimes overheard ambiguous remarks about "dongles", "forking" and "sausages"?

To say this in the most concise way, what price sanctimony?

> It's amazing how much intellectual talent we're missing out on because it seems tech scares away women.

I don't think "scares away" is accurate. There are reasons women don't get into tech, but I don't think being scared is high on the list. I also think this will change over time -- I think social perceptions are changing and technical and scientific occupations are gradually being seen less as a male approach to processing reality and more gender-neutral.

For all our sakes, I hope this is true.

I think scared is appropriate, inasmuch as it's a synonym for afraid. People want to choose a career they feel they can succeed in, and many women feel afraid that they can't succeed in tech, for a lot of reasons. Men feel it too, but being a minority in a field complicates things and probably makes it more likely for women to drop out or not choose tech as a career path in the first place.

> Men feel it too, but being a minority in a field complicates things and probably makes it more likely for women to drop out or not choose tech as a career path in the first place.

That's circular. It tries to say that women are a minority in tech because they drop out in larger numbers than men, because ... they're a minority. I don't this logic stands up under scrutiny.

The remedy is not to care about that. If I had to choose between being scared and having a boring life in which my gifts weren't fully exercised -- well, that would be much more scary. So even if we compare scary things, as I see it, being a member of a minority is rather low on the scary list.

With a ratio of nearly 20:1, I don't even know that you can say "it seems" that women are scared away anymore.

But being scared isn't necessarily the reason for the ratio. The fact that the ratio exists isn't itself an argument for a particular explanation.

I wasn't using "scared" literally, and I assume the person I was replying to wasn't, either. Web sites aren't generally actually frightening. [Insert your own punchline here]

I cant understand why the poll was taken down! Maybe we can make another simpler one? Without gender? It may be a little oversimplifying but it would be more viable regarding the platform. The starting options could be: Gay (Gay male/ Lesbian), Straight, Bisexual, Asexual, Queer, Pansexual . ?

It wasn't really that complicated! Gender does matter when it comes to sexual orientation as I believe more women identify as "non straight" than men. I did worry that I wasn't being inclusive enough, but didn't want it to get too long.

What was interesting, is that there's 20% non-straight guys, which is 4-5 times higher than the general population. This is really interesting to me.

I think it got flagged to death because it came across as backlash, which it wasn't.

I cant see how you can have a poll for both gender/sexuality. If you want to be inclusive it would easily have more than 50 option due to the simplicity of the HN polls (also Male/Female , internationally, are more usually used to describe sex not gender ) :/ It may have been flagged to death due to other factors as well (eg. homophobia?, people not being comfortable with it etc)

I think there was a strong bias for people who see themselves as not conforming to the norm to vote, so the would have been over-represented in the poll.

Maybe they're too smart to go into tech. Said (only half tongue in cheek) by a father of a smart daughter with no interest (so far) in tech. I don't think its solely parenting as my son is nuts for tech. And its not the lack of role model as I met the wife when she was in a Z80 assembly programming class, back when that tech was only somewhat obsolescent. Several years remain of copying mommy in all other ways, this is not a teen rebellion thing.

There are more influences than the parents, though.

How much of it is women being scared away versus women not having an interest or not considering it?

I'm not disagreeing that some women are scared away, but I can't fully expect that its the only reason for this gender imbalance.

As a guy, I can't really answer that. It'd take asking women outside of tech as to why they never considered it... Not just asking women in tech what they dislike about the gender imbalance in tech.

So much of it is Western culture. Here's one great example of another culture where women are not so much "welcomed" as they are just people - http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenIn...

I'll quote an excerpt from Lea Verou's exquisite article on sexism (http://pensieve.verou.me/post/47360690848/what-is-sexism) that I think helps answer this in a broader sense:

There is a lot of talk about what’s innate and what’s acquired. Characteristics we considered male or female for centuries are constantly being proven a result of nurture, either completely or by a large part, as tiny innate differences that grow intro troublesome gaps with social conditioning. Modern neuroscience keeps demonstrating how adaptable our brains are, and how society takes on the role of conditioning them on fixed gender roles from an incredibly young age. Have you ever noticed how gendered toys or child TV programmes are? How many people keep telling little girls they’re pretty and little boys that they’re smart or brave? That’s only the start of a rabbit hole that goes quite deep…

http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100516.gif

> It's amazing how much intellectual talent we're missing out on because it seems tech scares away women.

The same can be said about how stereotypes, personality types and culture scares away certain races, certain subcultures, certain age groups etc.

It's not as simple as "scares away half the population"; it might be so much as "scares away 95% of the population", of which there is an unknown percentage that would not be scared if some small part of any part of how tech looks to the outside changed.

And then there's a question of how many of those are really scared off.

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