Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

So, if I understand you right then because these polls are 'meaningless' we should assume the likelyhood of HN being populated by 95% females and 5% males as just as high as the reverse ?

Personally - and in contradiction to the link you posted - I'm assuming that people are either not going to report in or are going to tell the truth and that the chances of lying/not reporting in are about the same across genders.

With lying being very very low.

I started this poll because of this http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=749514 link posted (and dead within seconds) by a user that identified herself as a female by her name in the forum nickname.

It made me wonder how many of the anonymous nicknames belonged to females because for the most part all the names that I can relate to a gender on the forum with the exception of DaniFong belong to males.

View on HN

When you're a girl on the internet, you don't use an obviously girly name unless you want a certain kind of attention. Nuff said.

It's that bad ? Wow. Colour me naive, but that's really sad.

It depends on where you hang out. Some places are better than others, and some are even dominated by women. But in general, I agree. After a disturbing experience or two, I decided anonymity was simply easier than hassle. I suspect a lot of folks take this route.

Also, gender anonymity offers an additional freedom: in an age that points out and encourages women engineers and girl gamers, I would like to succeed or fail on my own merits. Anonymity guarantees that I do.

Hence, my current pseudonym, "Dove". It is believably feminine but not particularly so, and is about as non-stealth as I've ever been.

Well, as far as I'm concerned you're very welcome, whatever your gender. My curiosity was mainly in the ratio, not in identifying people, but I'm quite surprised at some of the developments in this thread. (in a positive way).

It shouldn't require you to be stealthy to be taken serious but I fully understand.

In my life at least one female programmer has had a pretty good influence on my development, here's to you Jenny Yip, wherever you are today :)

I'm part of a group of people that are involved with alternative energy, one of the guys there called himself 'fungus'. Everybody assumed him to be a male in is 30's, imagine the surprise when I found out he was a 13 year old whip-smart kid. Holding his own in a community where the average age is probably around 40.

If you're in that situation it's probably quite comparable to what you have to put up with. People will not give you 'full weight' because of who you are, instead of letting your creations stand on their own.

For a long time I thought about how to set up an abuse free forum, and my naive idea to require people to register with their real name went out the window when I realized that this guy, who is one of the best contributors there would not have joined at all.

One day...

When you're a girl on the internet, you probably don't identify with/find interesting most common girly names.

What are you guessing about me, and on what basis?

The claim about voluntary response polls was especially with reference to your idea of comparing the previous poll's results to the results of today's poll. Both polls might be completely unrepresentative of the population of interest. Assuming that people who come forward voluntarily answer questions truthfully does not assure as that the people who come forward to answer are a representative sample of the whole population.

http://aurora.wells.edu/~srs/Math151-Fall02/Litdigest.htm

http://www.edcallahan.com/web110/lectures/litdigest.htm

http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5168/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com