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Comment by belorn | Hacker News Reader

Nice to see someone else pointing out the statistics probability for women in tech conferences.

Just doing some basic calculations, the risk in going to a tech conference with 95% male vs 5% female has about 20 times higher risk than participating in a 50/50 conference if one assume that sexual assaults are male->female.

Like the term going postal, I would really like to see a study that could prove or disprove if technology conferences are in a higher risk group of sexual assault or if that reputation is just perceived risk vs actually risk.

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I'm curious about your calculations - my calculations suggest the probability of an assault goes up with the number of women.

Assume the probability of an individual man being an assaulter is beta, with alpha the fraction of women. Assume further any person interacts with K people at a conference, and if one of them is a woman he will assault her. Under the assumptions, the probability of an individual at the conference being assaulted is 1-pow(1-alpha, kbeta(1-alpha)).

That number increases, at least until approximately alpha ~= 60%.

http://i.imgur.com/CRm0I0i.png

tl;dr Basic rule of interaction models. More interactions == more interaction effects.

I don't think you are calculating the same thing. Your calculations are that an assult will happen, whereas belorn was calculating for a specific woman, whether she would be the victim.

I calculated the probability of an individual human being assaulted.

You've calculated the probability that _some_ individual will be assaulted. The probability that a given female will be assaulted though would be (I think):

P = 1 - \sum_{m=0}^K \choose{m}{K} (1-beta)^m (1-alpha)^m alpha^{K-m}

Let's use your equation with k = 20, alpha = 0.5 and beta = 0.1. This gives the probability of a person being assaulted as => 1 - pow(1 - alpha, kbeta(1 - alpha)) => 1 - pow(0.5, 20 * 0.1 * 0.5) => 1 - pow(0.5, 1) => 0.5

There's a 50% chance that a person will be assaulted. Divide by the number of women (10) gives a probability of 0.05 that a particular woman will be assaulted.

Now let's do the same thing, but changing alpha to 0.05 1 - pow(0.95, 20 * 0.1 * 0.95) => 1 - pow(0.95, 1.9) => 0.09

However as there is only one woman , that 0.09 probability is all her. In other words her odds of being assaulted have just about doubled.

Well, we are talking about basic calculations with just a few assumptions put in. As such, I would like to see a research worthy report on the subject.

In my number, I considered that in a group, a subset of the people will have a tendency to do sexual assault. If we only view the assaults as male -> female, than a 95%/5% conference will have 1.9 more such individuals with such tendencies compared to a equal sized 50%/50% conference. I also assume that the number of assaults will have a direct correlation with the number of people that a tendency towards sexual assaults.

The risk of any individual female participant will then be the number of assaults divided with the number of females at the conference. In the 95%/5% case, there will be a only a 1/10th of female participants and as such, you get 10*1.9 = 19 increased risk vs a 50%/50%. I rounded it to 20.

Your data point about the time each male spend with someone of the opposite sex is an interesting data point, but I do not know if there is a correlated to the number of sexual assaults and the time an assailant spends with the opposite sex. It need to be above zero, but beyond that I do not know. It would be effected by behavior theory of predators, and if they actively go out of their way to seek victims or not.

I see where our calculations differ. I'm assuming an assaulter can only assault one of the K < conference size people he meets, while you are assuming he can assault anyone anywhere.

You are also measuring assaults/female as opposed to assaults/human. That seems a little odd to me - if the number of assaults doubles, but the number of females triples, is that a good thing?

The individual risk for each female participant do go down if the number of female participants goes up. I would not categorize it as either bad or good, just an aspect of the nature of risk.

In the end through, I only trust my own numbers as a vague hint about what could be. There is just too many assumptions I make and factors to consider (such as group behavior, predator behavior, and so on). I hope a researcher, research student, or foundation will get interested in this topic so the answer to the question can be made once and for all.

> prove or disprove if technology conferences are in a higher risk group of sexual assault

Sexual awkwardness and unintentional offence at a tech conference I can entirely believe; but is there really an (even perceived, if not proven) higher rate of /assault/ among nerds than average people? :S

"higher rate of /assault/ among nerds than average people"

Pretty much the only "nerd rage" incident I can think of was a recent fight between Star Wars and Dr Who fans:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-norfolk-22542222

I knew England had soccer hooligans, but I wasn't expecting Doctor Who-ligans!

Not sure. It goes both ways. On the one side, nerds at tech conferences generally fall into the 'higher educated' category, who iirc are statistically less inclined to go into crime (and if they do, it's the type that pays off in millions instead of, say, burglar the local gas station).

However. I'm inclined to believe there's a bastard in everyone. I'm also inclined to believe the amount of single, frustrated men in IT is generally higher than other areas, where frustration can turn into anger, lashing out, and misogyny. There's also 'dude culture', where people in different demographics (gender, in this case) are made fun of / stereotyped / objectified.

tl;dr, it's complicated and I'm just thinking out loud here. Define "average"

There is some really crazy stuff that happens, but since very close to 100% of it happens to women, it's hard to get men to even believe it's happening. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3165434 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2572245 for example.

Edit: this article seems to have been moved http://web.archive.org/web/20110703201447/http://www.tammyca... but there is discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2571874

It's an unspoken assumption that goes unchallenged because it's easier for people targeted by these stereotypes to distance themselves from "nerds" than to challenge these assumptions.

> if one assume that sexual assaults are male->female.

Which is not valid.

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