Ask HN: What about women on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15836715

by baxtr • 9 years ago

12 26 9 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Out of curiosity: I wonder what the share of women on HN is. There are no real names or pictures on profiles so it’s really hard to say. Somehow though in my head all HN users appear as men. I hope that’s not true. Is there any way to falsify?

danieltillett• 9 years ago

Well yes. If one woman posts on HN then your theory is false.

To answer your question yes there are women who post here, but they are in the minority.

lovelearning2• 9 years ago

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=I%27m%20woman&sort=byPopularit...

wirddin• 9 years ago

Funny, it also displays "I'm not a woman" results in the first few pages.

miguelrochefort• 9 years ago

As expected, it's mostly threads talking about women, sexism, etc.

lovelearning2• 9 years ago

The question was "Somehow though in my head all HN users appear as men...Is there any way to falsify?"

The results list multiple "I'm a woman in tech and <blah> <blah>", thus falsifying OP's assumption. What they were talking about is irrelevant to OP's question.

thisone2• 9 years ago

why do you picture all posters on HN to be men?

that seems to say more about you than anything else.

mbrock2• 9 years ago

Maybe all the ones you see with a public profile seem to be male. Could be that everyone they've met in person who's on HN is male. You could argue there are more subtle cultural clues in something like typically male styles of interaction (the classic HN nitpicking is easy to imagine as related to "mansplaining"). Etc.

thisone2• 9 years ago

I see no reason in that for anyone to assume an entire internet forum to be exclusively one gender. Someone sees a set of interactions that they assume to be between a single gender, so they assume everyone is that gender?

DoreenMichele8• 9 years ago

It could be that it really is overwhelmingly male and that the women who do participate often downplay their gender, thereby making it look even more overwhelmingly male than it actually is, thus fostering the impression that it could be 100% male. It could also be that the lack of "social" elements, like avatars, makes it inherently hard to signal such details or ferret them out if you are curious about it.

(That is not a criticism. It is an observation. I like the way profiles are handled here.)

DoreenMichele8• 9 years ago

There are women here. Some of them actively hide or downplay their gender. My experience has been that even with being very open about my gender, I am sometimes misgendered by people assuming I am male. I know no means to put a stop to that and I feel that being too pushy about it would be counterproductive.

This is a new handle, but my original handle has 25k karma and is still on the leaderboard. As far as I know, I am the only woman on the leaderboard. If so, out of 100 names showing on the leaderboard, only one is a woman. This is really low even in comparison to the 17 percent figure often cited for female CEOs.

So, yeah, it is an overwhelmingly male forum, but I have been here over 8 years and I am fairly confident that the appearance of male domination is even worse than the reality. I see questions like yours from time to time, and the best I can tell you is that data over the years suggests that a) at least 2 to 3 percent of the active membership is female and b) this figure is probably a case of underreporting. There are probably more women here, it just doesn't look it.

It seems to me to be getting better.

owebmaster5• 9 years ago

It seems to me to be getting better.

Why more women in a forum where apparently not many women want to participate is getting better? I mean, I'm black and we are also disproportionately represented here and I hope this to change sometime, but it would make HN atmost more suitable to me and other people of color, not necessarily better at what HN is made for.

DoreenMichele8• 9 years ago

I find your phrasing unclear, so I don't really understand what you are asking.

xchip3• 9 years ago

Do you have any theory that could explain why there are so few women here?

DoreenMichele8• 9 years ago

I was not here from the start, so I don't really know what formed the culture here. But very off the cuff:

As best I can tell, it started as a bunch of men in a male dominated culture at a time when it was mostly men posting online. It is a public forum. Women online seem to gravitate to more walled garden type environments. Women online often post anonymously. This forum has a professional emphasis and even men who post under a handle instead of under their name are often pretty open about their actual name. A lot of men at the top of the leaderboard are people whom you can find articles about or a page on their employer's site or something like that. So there is third party corroboration of their identity. This is something women seem to be less likely to have in the first place, and it was worse some years ago when this forum was getting formed.

Each of those norms are norms women have trouble meeting. The more individual things you add that are hard for women to meet, the more excluded women are.

It's a little like saying "You don't have to be male, you just have to be over 6 feet tall, able to bench press X amount of weight and have a beard." Even if they decide that having a beard is some arbitrary sexist requirement that they are willing to drop, you still will find very few women who can meet the standards required to participate.

(Disclaimer: I have barely slept and posting here at all is probably a bad idea on so little sleep.)

twobyfour• 9 years ago

(Raises hand.) I don't advertise my gender, and most people who refer to me by a gendered pronoun assume I'm male. I don't usually bother to disabuse them of that notion, because it's typically irrelevant to the current topic of conversation. Exactly once did someone call out that assumption, which I appreciated.

HN is a perfectly comfortable place to be a woman... in conversations that don't touch at all on social issues.

On those that touch on lifestyle and family structure, I find that the assumptions here tend to be different than in other (not tech or startup oriented) communities I frequent. The direction of the discussion often implicitly hinges on the notion that anyone participating in the conversation either is single and childless or has a partner who is responsible for all things related to home and childrearing. That if one parent is going to prioritize childrearing over career it will be the mother. Etc.

It's not hostile. It's just... uncomfortable. The source of a lot of cognitive dissonance and a sense of being an outsider. A lack of identification and support within the community. If I brought it up in those contexts, I would expect to be shouted down by some for being off-topic and by others for being "shrill".

Then there are the topics that touch explicitly on gendered issues. Gender equality and the imbalance in tech. Sexual harassment in the workplace. Etc.

Those discussions are much less excruciating than they were even five years ago. And that's saying a lot because they are still extremely uncomfortable for me.

Oh, if it's about something truly egregious and inexcusable like a rape caught on video, I'm confident that the community here will express appropriate outrage. (Despite the very vocal 0.5% who post enough to make themselves look like 5% and will inevitably find a way to blame the victim. At least these days those schmucks generally get downvoted into oblivion. That wasn't always the case.)

But if there's even the slightest bit of uncertainty, the community as a whole seems to get defensive and use that as an excuse to question any claim that a man wronged a woman or that there might be society-wide biases that interfere with women a) getting equal consideration for opportunities or b) being able to just do their damn jobs or disagree with someone in discussions on the internet without having to fend off anything from leering to rape-and-murder threats.

That's probably, again, a tiny group of reactionaries being extremely vocal. But I don't see enough of the rest of the community making it clear that that's what they are.

In short, there are times (not all the time, but sometimes) when HN feels like a hostile place to be as a woman. There have been at least a few times when I've rage-quit (for a few weeks at least, the addiction is too strong). I've even abandoned a few accounts here in the past out of frustration or even fear generated by that hostility.

Those conversations are a tiny minority of the ones I have here, but they have a hold on my perception of the community that's disproportionate to their frequency because, well, adrenaline will do that to the brain.

In short, MOST of the time HN is a perfectly fine place to be a woman. Sometimes it's uncomfortable, but heck, to some degree the world is an uncomfortable place to be a woman. But on occasion it's hostile.

It's come a long way, but there's still a lot farther to go.

And if women who check out the community don't register accounts or don't stick around or don't participate... or even if they don't reveal their gender, those may be some of the reasons why.

By the way, I've been a member of co-ed communities where the default assumption upon meeting someone with a non-gendered handle was that they were female. The perception and assumption here that everyone is male is a self-reinforcing stereotype. It's like walking into a mall and thinking you don't see anyone who's gay if you don't see any men holding hands with one another. There are almost certainly gay people there, they're just invisible to you because you don't think to question the assumption that each person you encounter is straight.

There are more women here than you think.

Ask HN: What about women on HN?

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