Poll: Male or female or other

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520342

by codegeek • 13 years ago

105 200 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

speeder• 13 years ago

link for last pool?

codegeek6• 13 years ago

Updated in post.

Mz19• 13 years ago

Can you also leave the clickable linky? I am on an Android and can't copy-paste. Thanks.

Mz19• 13 years ago

And I am still interested in hearing from you if you are female. (Edit) Previous (closed) thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5074151

I guess you can post here or shoot me an email (my gmail starts with talithamichele).

Thanks.

fakeer2• 13 years ago

His profile connects to a blog of some "Yash Chandra". The name suggests he is a Hindu male. Most probably an Indian or a PIO.

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

Why is this relevant? Sure, his comment might sound a bit creepy to the wrong ears, but stating he is an Indian male is pointless, we shouldn't be judging him by either factor.

Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you and codegeek's reply is correct.

codegeek6• 13 years ago

I think Mz was referring to "you" as in anyone and not specifically me.

takotaco3• 13 years ago

In the previous thread that "he" linked to "he" states that "he" is actually female. I'm not sure why the gender of this person makes any difference though.

kgodey3• 13 years ago

I don't see a way to comment on that thread, but I'm female.

Mz19• 13 years ago

Oh, sorry. I did not realize that discussions automatically close at some point. Thanks for letting me know.

nicolethenerd• 13 years ago

Looks like that thread is too old to comment on?

Anyways, I think my username makes my gender fairly obvious. :-)

Mz19• 13 years ago

Yeah, sorry. I edited my remark to hopefully more accurately reflect that it is closed but you can still comment here.

Thanks for chiming in.

haimez2• 13 years ago

Obligatory comment about response bias. Glad we've gotten that out of the way.

md224• 13 years ago

Assuming you mean non-response bias, how would that figure into this poll? Do you think men or women would be more likely to vote?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-response_bias

anxx2• 13 years ago

created an account just to vote!

update: yes, female here! and long time hn reader, like years.

haimez2• 13 years ago

I don't think it's very relevant, but it was going to show up and I was hoping to dismiss the notion preemptively. Look at this quagmire you've started!

beyondavatars2• 13 years ago

I'd rather be considered a person in engineering rather than a woman in engineering, but I'm still interested in the stats.

kgodey3• 13 years ago

Me too.

jesss• 13 years ago

could not agree more.

takotaco3• 13 years ago

Why would you not want to be considered a woman in engineering if you actually are one?

As a female in Computer Science I am legitimately curious.

UnoriginalGuy3• 13 years ago

Maybe she just wants to be respected as an equal rather than being respected for being a female/trailblazer/different/etc.

kgodey3• 13 years ago

In my case, it's because my gender is not important to my identity and the constant harping about "women in tech" means that people pay way too much attention to my gender. I'm just another person!

beyondavatars2• 13 years ago

It's like when you call a friend your "black friend" rather than your friend.

niggler4• 13 years ago

(obligatory comment regarding the fact that gender isn't necessarily a dichotomy) How about both (hermaphrodites) or neither?

publicfig• 13 years ago

Just a note, "hermaphrodite" is a wildly inaccurate term to define those with an indeterminate sex within the dichotomy of male/female and can be quite offensive as well, especially when used outside of specific cases (none of which I've ever heard to be identified accurately as strictly hermaphroditic)

niggler4• 13 years ago

Hermaphroditism is incredibly rare, but there are recorded cases (including cases of births involving hermaphrodites: according to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18394621 there were 11 reported cases of fertility in true hermaphrodites)

ctdonath• 13 years ago

The POCT-1A data protocol includes six possible values for "gender".

niggler4• 13 years ago

my duckduckgo-fu is failing me: could you enumerate the possible values?

itsybitsycoder• 13 years ago

"Hermaphrodite" isn't a gender.

rpncreator• 13 years ago

This assumes the presence of gender binary. This assumes a person fits into one of those identities, which is not always the case.

codegeek6• 13 years ago

I thought about adding a 3rd option but don't want to start a controversial post/poll.

EDIT: Added it on public demand.

Mz19• 13 years ago

You already did (start a controversy). If you can add "other", I suggest you do so. It will reduce some of the fallout.

cllns• 13 years ago

Seems like it's too late for that.

You should just add another option and ignore the haters.

(edit: thanks)

j45• 13 years ago

Not sure if it would be a big deal. Some things are bug deals if treated as one. Transgender has been a long existing thing, the awareness of our particular civilization might not be high.

codegeek6• 13 years ago

ok i added the "other" choice without trying to come up with a cute/smart description.

philipp-de• 13 years ago

the last 2 polls also had only 2 options. so for comparisons sake it will be better to leave it at that, i think.

niggler4• 13 years ago

it happens: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18394621

Dewie6• 13 years ago

The wording hints more at a biological sex binary.

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

How so?

Other than http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ and specific gender/sex studies, I haven't seen studies that make a distinction between gender and sex. Of course, if you want to make the distinction about biological sex, then you have to define which of the biological criteria and categories you're using, and even then you need more than two categories (http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html).

FUlibs5• 13 years ago

"Identities"? Go fuck yourself. You don't "identify as" male or female. You ARE male or female, because you have a cock or a vag. Simple as that. Why do liberals like shit like this?

dwb3• 13 years ago

Ok, obviously a troll, but just leaving this here in case someone sincerely holds this opinion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

jcromartie4• 13 years ago

I wish it were that simple. It would save a lot of people a lot of misery. Unfortunately we organisms are unimaginably complex, and it turns out that, although the vast majority of the time it comes down male/female, things do land on a spectrum in terms of biological sex.

(heterosexual male upper-middle class white American here...)

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

So a combat veteran born with a penis, but who lost it in combat is no longer male, simply because he no longer has a cock?

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

195:13 (now 195:14) at the time of writing.

I can't say I'm surprised, but that's more than 13x. I didn't know it was that bad.

pmelendez2• 13 years ago

16x now

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

1061:(64:27) at the time of writing. 11.6x

codegeek6• 13 years ago

Previous polls clickable:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=%22Poll%3A...

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

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!)

Tichy2• 13 years ago

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

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

How so?

schallis• 13 years ago

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

fnordfnordfnord3• 13 years ago

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.

danilocampos3• 13 years ago

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.

lutusp14• 13 years ago

> 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?

simonsarris• 13 years ago

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.

UnoriginalGuy3• 13 years ago

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.

Mz19• 13 years ago

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?

dominicmauro2• 13 years ago

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

lutusp14• 13 years ago

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.

redidas• 13 years ago

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.

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

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...

mnicole6• 13 years ago

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

lutusp14• 13 years ago

> 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.

bird_in_hand6• 13 years ago

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.

VLM2• 13 years ago

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.

icebraining3• 13 years ago

There are more influences than the parents, though.

stratosvoukel2• 13 years ago

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 . ?

kintamanimatt3• 13 years ago

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.

Dewie6• 13 years ago

> 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.

flipside2• 13 years ago

binary? really?

There are other answers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender

Edit: Thanks for adding other.

shmerl• 13 years ago

Do robots qualify as "other"?

jlgreco6• 13 years ago

They presumably could. I'd say a car construction robot is ungendered but, as a fictional example, Bender from Futurama is male gendered. Ungendered would be "other" I would say.

Paul_S• 13 years ago

He's not asking about gender, he's asking about sex. I don't know why he's getting so much flack for it.

FUlibs5• 13 years ago

There is no such thing as gender. It's something liberals made up.

mtinkerhess• 13 years ago

There do exist people whose biological sex doesn't fall neatly into male or female.

flipside2• 13 years ago

"sex" is complicated too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

Not like most people even check which chromosomes people have.

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

Humans have more than just two sex categories http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Essays/marriage.html

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

Are they? "Male" and "Female" would usually refer to gender in this context.

booop• 13 years ago

Wow, 700 votes in just 40 minutes. Looks like this is HN's favorite topic.

jurassic• 13 years ago

Female here and longtime lurker before registering somewhat recently. The only time I feel very cognizant of the gender imbalance is in comments of articles about the lack of women in tech. Some amount of introspection on how to be welcoming to everyone is good, but the constant drumbeat of articles on the "woman question" definitely increases my feelings of "otherness". These pieces and the comments that follow are often addressed toward men as if there are no women present.

lutusp14• 13 years ago

> These pieces and the comments that follow are often addressed toward men as if there are no women present.

Or perhaps they're comments that the writer believes are gender-neutral, so the gender of the reader isn't an issue? This is obviously not always true, but it might be in some cases that are misread as being male comments directed toward other men.

> Some amount of introspection on how to be welcoming to everyone is good, but the constant drumbeat of articles on the "woman question" definitely increases my feelings of "otherness".

The "woman question" wording isn't really the most common phrasing, and it certainly sounds exclusionary.

In all such exchanges, there are some encouraging facts:

1. Mathematics doesn't care about your gender.

2. Code doesn't care about your gender.

3. A properly run code project doesn't care about your gender, only whether you can code.

Expressed another way, the basics of code development are gender-neutral, and where people are involved, a certain amount of direct experience will persuade most people that your results are worth supporting.

As to being excluded in a more social sense, the best way to defeat that is not to care about it. It's basic human psychology that not caring about acceptance will make the other group members wonder why you don't care, which naturally enough and quickly makes you an insider.

jnevill• 13 years ago

BOOM! MANSPLAINED!

mnicole6• 13 years ago

> As to being excluded in a more social sense, the best way to defeat that is not to care about it. It's basic human psychology that not caring about acceptance will make the other group members wonder why you don't care, which naturally enough and quickly makes you an insider.

You can't seriously believe this. This same argument is made in gaming about issues people have with how women are treated and depicted within that industry: "If you don't bring it up and act like it's a problem, people won't think it's a problem and therefore it won't happen." It's a total crock, not "basic human psychology".

Hateful people don't care that they're the minority; they'll type in all-caps, call you a crybaby, show up with their guns out for all to see, call you sheeple and claim their truth is the real truth regardless of their numbers.

galvanist• 13 years ago

I think that some ongoing discussion of the STEM gender gap and other difficult group introspection is useful and important and I hope we can navigate the line between being self-aware and beating a field of dead horses.

Anyway my interest in this now annual survey (and the short-lived sexual orientation survey and the hypothetical race survey) is more self-serving and not so much about how to solve a problem. I'm interested in a profile on HN, as a community, to help me decide how much attention to pay / weight to give to elements of certain discussions here. If we're just a straight white dude monoculture then I want to factor that into my thinking. Come to think of it, I'd be interested to learn about the overall gender / age / ethnicity / sexual orientation / religion / country of origin demographics of other groups that I sometimes pay attention to (like Interesting People) especially when the community has a voting role in discussion moderation (like HN or reddit).

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

This makes me wonder how many females here are cisgender. Myself, I'm transgender. I reckon there's probably a far higher proportion than average, since some transwomen have opposite-gendered childhoods, and hence were in an environment where being in tech would be acceptable, perhaps.

I'm not saying it's a problem if there are a lot of trans women here, it's just it would be highlighting a problem if there aren't a lot of cis women here in comparison, because that would mean tech was scaring women away and the only ones who were here are the ones who had been unfortunate enough to have had male childhoods.

(I'm worried this will come off as horribly bigoted or something, I don't know, I hope people can see what I'm getting at)

FUlibs5• 13 years ago

So you're a guy who likes dressing up like a girl. Ok, acceptable. Now stop lying and calling yourself a girl. You're not.

Edit: Fuck you downvoters. Yes, I know it's socially unacceptable to question someone's "identity". I don't care. That identity is a lie. He's a woman because he likes women's clothing just like I'm black because I love me some fried chicken.

Fargren3• 13 years ago

Gender and sex are two different things. If she identifies with the female gender, well then she has every right to be called a girl.

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

This is the internet, I can call myself a girl if I want to. If other people don't want to, that's their problem.

Also, you clearly don't know anything about trans people if you think it's as simple as "dressing up like a girl".

jlgreco6• 13 years ago

Why did you create a new account to post this shit? At least have the common decency to own up to your own bigotry.

yaddayadda9• 13 years ago

Biological sex is many things, chromosomes, genitalia, hormones, and the effects of these. If any of these don't match, is the person a guy or a girl? Even among these, there is ambiguity. I have a friend who - no joking - was born with both a vagina and penis. According to you, is my friend a guy or a girl? There were Olympic athletes who had vaginas and no penis but XY chromosomes, are they guys or girls? There is at least one study that showed transgender women (regardless of transition status) had traditionally female brains, so why should a penis at birth be more important then the person's brain?

noonespecial• 13 years ago

Sometimes I forget how fierce trolling can be. HN actually has very little of it so this really stands out. I'd have blown right past it on reddit but here I accidentally read it like a real comment. Kind of like absent-mindedly eating that last shriveled and nasty grape in the bunch while preoccupied.

s_baby• 13 years ago

A) It's pretty clear the brains of transgendered are physiologically different.

B) People who have an emotional response to sexuality and gender are usually the ones who have repressed issues regarding their sexuality and gender identity. It's a touchy situation. On one hand I want to call you out for being a bigot on the other I feel sympathetic and wish you the best.

Mz19• 13 years ago

I am a cis female, but I am not sure if you would view me as "in tech". I run some websites. I have a certificate in GIS. I have never managed to get a job in GIS (long, irrelevent story).

I think it isn't "tech" that's the problem. I think it is "the old boys club" atmosphere, which can be changed.

Thanks for chiming in.

bird_in_hand6• 13 years ago

The young boys have sometimes been worse than the old ones. When I talk to CTOs in their 30s, I feel like they take me more seriously and much less suspiciously than the 24 year olds.

bird_in_hand6• 13 years ago

I've been to a conference for undergraduate GSMs in tech, and while I don't have any statistics, it felt like there were almost as many transwomen/genderqueer presenting as female as there were women (and still many more men and transmen). I think it's super awesome that tech is as welcoming to trans people as it is and has been from other people's stories that I've heard. I'm just worried that it isn't as sensitive to bi-cis-women as trans folks and gays or lesbians.

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

Me too, it's great that tech is accepting of them. The ratios worry me though. I don't think trans women are drawn to tech just because it's trans-friendly, I think women are pushed away from tech but trans womens' unique circumstances mean they stay, or something like that.

jcromartie4• 13 years ago

When a woman gives a deep technical talk on some comp sci topic, I pretty much assume she's trans. I'm not sure why, but it's been pretty true so far.

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

Unfortunately, the fact that tech is seen as a male-dominated field, and what you said often being true, may only serve to reinforce the notion that trans women are men for some people.

Koldark• 13 years ago

Does it really matter???

jcromartie4• 13 years ago

I try to treat everybody on tech sites as if I don't know their gender, but I certainly assume that they are male.

TazeTSchnitzel10• 13 years ago

It's ingrained into my subconscious. I automatically refer to people on IRC networks and such with male pronouns, without thinking about it.

This is despite being female and sometimes frequenting majority-female channels.

benaiah4• 13 years ago

Mostly OT grammar nerd musings:

I use male singular pronouns for people whose sex I'm not aware of because English male singular pronouns are actually also its neuter singular pronouns (I believe this is true for several other major languages, as well). Hence, for a noun that has gender, but whose gender is unknown, the correct pronoun is "he", rather than some silly construction such as "he/she" or the at worst flagrantly incorrect, at best vastly confusing singular "they". (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun#Universa...)

"One" is also a reasonable alternative, though its odd construction means it can't be used as a drop-in replacement, and it can often sound awkward, overly formal, or antiquated.

When political correctness became a big deal, people bent over backwards to avoid using "he" as a gender-neutral pronoun, overcorrecting so much that they forgot that "he" isn't necessarily masculine (the universal "he" started losing favor in the 1960s). It was similar to the guy that got fired for saying "niggardly" (a synonym for stingy) because it sounds like "nigger", despite the fact that the similarities are meaningless and entirely coincidental.

Depending on how PC the crowd is, I'll sometimes use one of the incorrect constructions to avoid ill-placed ire.

Interestingly, Baltimore primary school students have started using "yo" as a neutral third person singular (http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/grammar-yo-pronoun.aspx - Warning: autoplaying audio ads, and a fullscreen ad that covers the page on load). While I don't like "yo" for purely subjective reasons, it is an interesting linguistic development.

EDIT: fixed the spelling of "niggardly". Thanks, jcromartie.

mnicole6• 13 years ago

Something that's been discussed in a few mailing lists/blog entries I've seen lately are women who are really put-off by the phrase "guys" to refer to a mass of people. For me, the word is synonymous with "all" rather than "male" specifically, and I don't consider it to be offensive in the least. Now I'm all paranoid about all the times I've - as a female myself - walked up to a group of girls saying, "Hey guys!"

I'd be interested in others' thoughts on this.

camus4• 13 years ago

me too . is it a bad thing ? i dont know , would you assume i'm black ? you'd have no way to guess i am.

grandalf• 13 years ago

Ever since lobste.rs it's only the brogrammers who are left on HN

icebraining3• 13 years ago

Why do you feel you're a brogrammer?

pmelendez2• 13 years ago

Honest question: What is exactly the Other option? Don't trans-men and trans-women identify their selves as Male or Female anyway?

bird_in_hand6• 13 years ago

There are people who identify as genderqueer, who don't fit into any gender identity, and people who identify as a gender, who don't have a gender identity.

bird_in_hand6• 13 years ago

Damn you, auto-correct. That's "agender."

Fargren3• 13 years ago

There's people who don't identify as any gender. There's also physically interesexual people[1].

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex

lambada• 13 years ago

Gender is not binary. Myself, I'm neither male nor female in terms of my identity. To simplify it a bit, When I think of myself in my head I don't think of myself as being "a male" or "a female".

djcapelis2• 13 years ago

Genderqueer and other folks who identify outside the binary often prefer an other option. Trans people who identify as either a woman or man usually answer according to how they identify.

kation• 13 years ago

my vote isn't counting or changing the number at all, but it would be a +1 to female.

anxx2• 13 years ago

we seem to have stabilized at 7

tzs• 13 years ago

There's also a sexual orientation poll going on now [1]. It's been killed [2], so no more comments, but voting still works.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5520651

[2] I have no idea why

mdisraeli• 13 years ago

Female here, although I don't often comment. Used to place a few choice comments as FeministHacker [1], until a desk move at the office cost me access to the account. Oh well, incentive to get blogging more!

I've a lot of people who are very much dear to me who identify as non-binary, so I was thrilled to see the great support for the other option. As predictable for trans/cis discussions, a real jerk emerged from the woodwork, but the general support is great too!

Regarding the general topic of LGBT+ people (now that the other poll has been killed), if you're a queer hacker in the UK, feel free to get in touch!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=FeministHacker

p6v53as• 13 years ago

Seems like gender ratio is not changing over time. But, to my surprise, there are actually more females than I expected.

tokenadult• 13 years ago

By the way, we will have no idea what the actual ratio is here on Hacker News even after many more poll responses are recorded. (Another comment already in the thread points out that some respondents are voting more than once.) That's the defect of voluntary response polls. See

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5482013

for a recent posting of a FAQ on the subject. I have no doubt that there are more male than female participants here, and no idea what the actual ratio is.

(Most online communities I participate in, including my circle of Facebook friends, have a strong female majority. That's because many of those online communities pertain to education policy, and mothers care more about that issue than fathers, on average, at least as to online participation in discussion of policy.)

joshguthrie• 13 years ago

Results are overwhelming, a 12:1 ratio for males:females and a 40:1 ratio for male:other.

At first, I was afraid to answer this poll truthfully because of the recent "gender issues" our scene has faced. But reading through the comments...yes, we (as always) dwelved into the "gender stuff" again but all involved parties managed to have a decent and civilized discussion.

Which made me realize: what our community really needs to improve isn't "red cards", "women-only events", "enforced talks parity" or any other stuff that's just dividing us further. What our community needs is civilized discussion.

Poll: Male or female or other

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