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Comment by yummyfajitas | Hacker News Reader

If this was a major barrier then we'd expect the numbers to be closer in learning paths where feedback is negligible or where gender is mostly invisible. I.e., we'd see plenty of self taught women but few college educated ones, and more women in open source than in corporate environments.

Is that the pattern we see?

[edit: based on all the downvotes I'm guessing the data doesn't fit the theory? Oops.]

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Feedback from peers within your (current or desired) field is not the only feedback of importance in most people's lives. Disbelief and discouragement are at least as likely to come from social acquaintances, friends, neighbors, and family, whose actions are typically more impactful on the young (not to say many of the old).

In any case, feedback is not the only deterrent, nor is it the most powerful. A lifetime of insinuations and flat-out statements from the vocal majority of your peers and teachers that x is not your domain--before you've even had a chance to think that it might be--does much to shape a person.

But probably some of your downvotes are coming because you're discounting how much louder and more open sexism tends to be online than in the office.

If you have a fixed amount of negative feedback from friends and family and a lower level of negative feedback from codeacademy than from a teacher, negative feedback is lower for autodidacts. If negative feedback reduces involvement, then (male autodidacts)/(male programmers) should be lower than (female autodidacts)/(female programmers).

Does this theory need the additional hypothesis that real life negative feedback is higher for women privately doing things with their computers?

What experiment/measurement (if any) could invalidate this theory?

But probably some of your downvotes are coming because you're discounting how much louder and more open sexism tends to be online than in the office.

This seems implausible. In most technical circles (see, e.g., HN) there is reflexive political correctness and mobbing against anyone who dares question the party line. Witness the comments on this article as a perfect example. We literally have the president of ycombinator making a personal attack against someone who dares to ask why a set of anecdotes is interesting.

(Note that I've never seen sama or anyone else attack someone for "why would I use your lib over sqlite?")

There isn't a "fixed amount of negative feedback"; most people, men and women, will do their utmost to minimize that feedback, particularly when it comes from people who are otherwise decent to us or play a large part in determining the smoothness or roughness of our lives. And particularly when that feedback comes preemptively from an early age.

Reflexive political correctness on HN and other forums, meanwhile, is not preemptive. It is in response to the overwhelming amount of belligerence, innuendo, and offhand sexism that runs rampant when there is no such moderation. If you think it implausible that sexism is more noticeable and notable online than in schools or workplaces, I have to wonder how much time you've spent on BBS, IRC, etc., over the years. Or else whether you just don't notice it. This wouldn't be unusual; sexism is so embedded in most parts of the world that it takes either a great amount of reflection or a small amount of finding yourself on the wrong end of it to notice. (We are, after all, communicating in a language in which "gratify me, a man, sexually" is among the stronger insults.)

(Note that I've never seen sama or anyone else attack someone for "why would I use your lib over sqlite?")

I would not expect anyone to feel as strongly about libraries as they do about how other people are treated; in fact, I'd be glad not to know them if they did.

I have to disagree here a bit with your first sentence, or elaborate on it. I agree with the rest of your post.

Because many people mean well and want to smooth our life paths, many people, male and female, will tell women, "You know, tech is a really rough industry. I'm sure you'd be good at it, but you might not want to deal with trying to make it in such a male-dominated field. Are you sure you don't want to try medicine or advertising instead? Or be a librarian? Then you could use your skills but not have to ..."

"You know, research math is really competitive and your likelihood of getting a good tenure-track job is not high. Are you sure you don't want to focus on teaching instead? High schools always need good teachers and they're everywhere, and you could be such a good role model..."

"You know, a startup is a really risky endeavor that takes up a lot of time and really pulls you away from your family. Maybe you should consider an entrepreneurial role in a big company instead so that you could have the security..."

People rarely say outright negative things. They just want the best for a woman -- something a little less risky, a little less hard, maybe a little more nurturing. And nothing I said above was false, and if you are a guy reading this I'm sure you'll say "Someone said that to me once!", but you're not doing the constant swim against the current that a woman is doing (or not).

...most people, men and women, will do their utmost to minimize that feedback...

You clearly didn't even read what I said (hint: what I said was entirely based on this phenomenon).

It also seems likely that you can't think of a measurement that would refute your theory. If that's the case, then it's not even wrong.

The only person on this thread who treated anyone badly was Sam Altman. The belligerence is almost entirely on the part of the PC crowd. If you want to see more examples, browse my history. See, e.g. DanBC's comment from last week calling me a misogynist for asking a simple philosophical question (admittedly, a question that confounded the PC crowd).

Saying that someone was "the reason" YC had to build a page was a little tactless, but it wasn't belligerent. What you're doing here is projecting all of your own defensiveness/tribalism into Altman's words, and through that lens it's easy for you to see aggression. The charitable interpretation is "the fact that there are people like you with this misconception about gender parity in CS is why we wrote that page".

That's not belligerent or aggressive. It's like me saying "the fact that people like you choose unauthenticated Blowfish CBC mode for your cryptosystems is why we had to write the crypto challenges". Again not the most tactful way to say it, but it's not mean either.

That is a more charitable interpretation. Having been on the receiving end of far more obvious belligerence, it is possible I'm interpreting things less charitably than I should. Thanks for pointing it out.

> We literally have the president of ycombinator making a personal attack against someone who dares to ask why a set of anecdotes is interesting.

Describing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8653669 as a personal attack seems... excessive.

(Looks like he edited it though, were you talking about the original version?)

The original version said "you are the problem". It's hardly cursing someone out, but it is certainly more hostility than is normally desired here.

I agree, that version is absolutely a personal attack.

Like I said upthread: there is a difference between saying that someone with a particular misconception is a reason to build a website, and literally attacking them for holding that misconception. Altman's comment was a little personalized, but in context only a little bit: the only thing Altman could have known about the commenter was that they held the misconception.

To push it over the line into "personal attack", maybe it would need to read something more like:

"You're the reason we had to waste time building this site."

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