7 ms·

This Q&A Series seems like it would have the opposite of it's intended effect. You want to ask woman engineers about family matters? That seems analagous to gi

This Q&A Series seems like it would have the opposite of it's intended effect. You want to ask woman engineers about family matters? That seems analagous to giving your wife a vacuum cleaner for her birthday.

Mz 10y ago
It isn't ideal, but there seems to be no good path forward. If this simply makes women more visible and more empowered to talk on HN, that will be a step forward.
- ng12 10y ago
  Are women not empowered to talk on HN? I feel like it's pseudo-anonymous.
  - Mz 10y ago
    I seem to be the most "prominent" openly female member in terms of forum participation. My research indicates that the short answer is "no." It has gotten better over time, but there is lots of room for improvement.
    - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
      What exactly does 'not being empowered to talk' mean in a place where no one can really tell anyone's gender and everything is online? I'm just taking your word you're a woman and you have as much opportunity to post or reply as anyone else.
      - Mz 10y ago
        Women get responded to differently here in ways that women themselves report is problematic. (http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/oh-my-god-its-girl.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/oh-my-god-it...) There appear to be no women on the leaderboard. The leaderboard lists 100 names. The top of it is stable, but, my understanding is that your name drops off of it if you are inactive for X amount of time. The bottom is not stable. Names appear and disappear. So there are likely something over 100 members with enough karma to qualify for the leaderboard, at some points during the year. I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. I posted a question or two trying to find out who was female here. Some women created accounts in order to reply. So, there appear to be a lot of women who lurk and read but do not feel comfortable participating. I ended up gathering some objective data to the best of my ability because the social piece is pretty opaque here. I did not have an agenda initially. But I was experiencing a lot of friction and there was soft social evidence suggesting I was "prominent" for a woman here at a time when I had something like 3000 or 4000 karma. I put that data on my blog. For example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-data-on-prominence-of-women-on.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat... I can't prove any of this. If you want to be pedantic, hey, you win. But as a woman who ended up inadvertently researching how prominent I was because I was having what I felt was an excessive amount of friction for a "nobody," my opinion is that a) HN is not very welcoming of women and b) it has gotten better over time and is continuing to improve. Do with that opinion as you wish. I don't feel like getting dragged into some stupid argument where multiple men verbally beat on me while swearing women don't face challenges here. Such situations never seem to strike the multiple men engaging in the pile on as either ironic nor as de facto evidence supporting my assertion that there are issues.
        protomikron 10y ago
        The problem is, that the assumption "Women get responded to differently here" is just impossible to check, as this is an anonymous forum and you can choose the login name you want and their is no gender data associated with you (which is obviously fantastic). In particular I would assume there are many people here that just do not give a fuck about who writes comments, at least I rarely check the user name. > I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?
        Mz 10y ago
        I am not the only person who has observed that women get responded to differently here. You do not have to (in your words) "give a fuck who writes comments" to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves. > I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters? I phrased that very carefully and it is factually correct in the way it is phrased. No, I do not know the gender of all members. Like I said, if you want to be pendantic, whatever. But, yes, I can know for a fact that I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I sure as hell know for a fact that I am thousands short of the leaderboard. That last detail is very easily checked.
        protomikron 10y ago
        > You do not have to give a fuck who writes comments to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves. I am not sure I understand your point here, but if I do not care who writes the post, the only information that would leak the gender is the comment itself, and I do not think that one could reliable deduce the gender of a commenter by inspecting the comment (considering the comments in most HN discussions). Sure there might be discussions where this is possible, but I do not believe that this is the case for most of HN's discussions.
      - stale2002 10y ago
        Maybe they aren't comfortable posting here. The question people should ask is "what is it about Hacker News that makes women uncomfortable and unlikely to participate in? "
    - szatkus 10y ago
      What's wrong with HN community? In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online. Disclaimer: [M27]
      - grzm 10y ago
        "What's wrong with HN community?" I'm going to go kinda meta here. Feel free to dismiss if that's not your bag. "wrong" implies good/bad, which also implies a purpose: good or bad for what? Consider the question "what kind of community should HN be?" From here, let's move on to your statement: "In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online." It sounds like in your opinion HN should be an open community. Is it as open as it should be? Is the "most open community [you've] seen online" as open as it could be? should be? As you want it to be? Given that there are people that don't feel as welcome as they want to, what does that imply about the community's openness? I don't have the answers to this. I think it's human nature to tend to group, and not every group is for every body. I have seen behavior here that I think is unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for. Maybe that's not the same as open, but I think they're closely related. Does that mean people should toughen up? Be more considerate? Leave if they don't like it? This doesn't match what I would like the HN community to be, but I know I'm relatively new, and that reflects me. Like I said, I don't have the answers.
        szatkus 10y ago
        Thanks for your comment. As everyone here I have my own idea for the community. But that's just my opinion and what I see here is quite good. As for comments which are "unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for" they are usually downvoted. I use RSS, so usually I'm late to the party. And I rarely upvote anything.
        grzm 10y ago
        I'm glad to see that those kinds of comments are usually down voted as well. And compared to Twitter and what I've heard of Reddit, in general it is pretty good here. As I'm learning how the community works, I've been leaving "showdead" on so I see a lot of stuff, and the different color calls my attention to the worst of it, at least for now. These types of conversations continue to pop up, with varying levels of civility. In your opinion, why is that? Do you think we eventually will find some sort of agreement? Will they diminish? How do they contribute to the community?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- balls187 10y ago
  Getting women together to get their perspective on things, sounds good. Asking them about things that pretty much all women are asked about, as if that's the only thing they are qualified to talk about, seems counter.
  - Mz 10y ago
    It is part of a series of Q&As. This is not the only installment. Refusing to ask stereotypically "girly" questions is another form of sexism. Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women. Refusing to hear women's voices on the topic is just as problematic as only talking to women about this sort of topic and nothing else.
    - balls187 10y ago
      Except no one is refusing to ask questions, nor refuse to hear women's opinions. > Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women. Yes it is. But the questions were about making the workplace more family friendly, and workplace dating, which to me, feels like a real missed opportunity to share real insight. I get it though--I don't own the topics of discussion. I was just sharing my perspective. TBH, it doesn't really matter what anyone thinks about workplace dating. In the US, HR have policies in place to prevent legal issues. Full Disclosure: My wife and I started dating while we both worked at the same startup.
- sn 10y ago
  I always have mixed feelings on these types of posts. It is good to ask these questions because there are simply biological issues that the other sex is not going to have personal experiences with. Pregnancy and breastfeeding? I know there are considerations that someone who has not gone through these events (including women without children) are just not going to relate to. We also can't control how people react to us in person and the assumptions that are made based on our appearance, regardless of what are personality is. You aren't going to resolve those issues without identifying what they are in the first place. Personally I would like it if the series was "ask an engineer who is female" rather than "ask a female engineer" though.
  - Mz 10y ago
    I also have mixed feelings, but I am trying to be supportive of this effort because it is at least shooting for the right goal, which is building bridges instead of trying to hang men high. One of my favorite professors had an excellent saying: I am the primitive of my way. It kind of encapsulates both the idea that anything worth doing is worth doing badly and also the idea of fail fast and iterate. Perhaps if people keep giving constructive feedback to this initiative in a not ugly way it will evolve into something that more effectively promotes their agenda without so many glaring defects. Perhaps one option would be to change it to "Ask an Engineer" and then have each installment be about some category, such as senior programmers, multicultural engineers, older people, and also sometimes women. So then it could be, for example, "Ask an Engineer: Senior Programmer edition" or "Ask an Engineer: Female edition" or something like that.
    - sn 10y ago
      Yes, I also don't like the 'us vs. them' mentality a lot of women-focused groups seem to have. I really like your idea of rotating through different groups who are statistically underrepresented (not just women.)
snowwrestler 10y ago
The point of this series is that a lot of women engineers already do get asked all sorts of awkward questions, or worse, are subjected to uninformed assumptions. This Q&A series is intended to put information out in a public form to help preempt some of that.

Mz 10y ago

It isn't ideal, but there seems to be no good path forward. If this simply makes women more visible and more empowered to talk on HN, that will be a step forward.

ng12 10y ago
Are women not empowered to talk on HN? I feel like it's pseudo-anonymous.
- Mz 10y ago
  I seem to be the most "prominent" openly female member in terms of forum participation. My research indicates that the short answer is "no." It has gotten better over time, but there is lots of room for improvement.
  - 2muchcoffeeman 10y ago
    What exactly does 'not being empowered to talk' mean in a place where no one can really tell anyone's gender and everything is online? I'm just taking your word you're a woman and you have as much opportunity to post or reply as anyone else.
    - Mz 10y ago
      Women get responded to differently here in ways that women themselves report is problematic. (http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/oh-my-god-its-girl.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2014/01/oh-my-god-it...) There appear to be no women on the leaderboard. The leaderboard lists 100 names. The top of it is stable, but, my understanding is that your name drops off of it if you are inactive for X amount of time. The bottom is not stable. Names appear and disappear. So there are likely something over 100 members with enough karma to qualify for the leaderboard, at some points during the year. I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. I posted a question or two trying to find out who was female here. Some women created accounts in order to reply. So, there appear to be a lot of women who lurk and read but do not feel comfortable participating. I ended up gathering some objective data to the best of my ability because the social piece is pretty opaque here. I did not have an agenda initially. But I was experiencing a lot of friction and there was soft social evidence suggesting I was "prominent" for a woman here at a time when I had something like 3000 or 4000 karma. I put that data on my blog. For example: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-data-on-prominence-of-women-on.html http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-dat... I can't prove any of this. If you want to be pedantic, hey, you win. But as a woman who ended up inadvertently researching how prominent I was because I was having what I felt was an excessive amount of friction for a "nobody," my opinion is that a) HN is not very welcoming of women and b) it has gotten better over time and is continuing to improve. Do with that opinion as you wish. I don't feel like getting dragged into some stupid argument where multiple men verbally beat on me while swearing women don't face challenges here. Such situations never seem to strike the multiple men engaging in the pile on as either ironic nor as de facto evidence supporting my assertion that there are issues.
      - protomikron 10y ago
        The problem is, that the assumption "Women get responded to differently here" is just impossible to check, as this is an anonymous forum and you can choose the login name you want and their is no gender data associated with you (which is obviously fantastic). In particular I would assume there are many people here that just do not give a fuck about who writes comments, at least I rarely check the user name. > I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters?
        Mz 10y ago
        I am not the only person who has observed that women get responded to differently here. You do not have to (in your words) "give a fuck who writes comments" to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves. > I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I am thousands short of the leaderboard. Although I am not sure how important that is (HN Karma), I would say you can not know that, as this implies, that you know the gender of the top thousand HN commenters? I phrased that very carefully and it is factually correct in the way it is phrased. No, I do not know the gender of all members. Like I said, if you want to be pendantic, whatever. But, yes, I can know for a fact that I appear to have the highest karma of any openly female member and I sure as hell know for a fact that I am thousands short of the leaderboard. That last detail is very easily checked.
        protomikron 10y ago
        > You do not have to give a fuck who writes comments to respond differently to a population that is likely to have a different set of experiences and a different way of expressing themselves. I am not sure I understand your point here, but if I do not care who writes the post, the only information that would leak the gender is the comment itself, and I do not think that one could reliable deduce the gender of a commenter by inspecting the comment (considering the comments in most HN discussions). Sure there might be discussions where this is possible, but I do not believe that this is the case for most of HN's discussions.
    - stale2002 10y ago
      Maybe they aren't comfortable posting here. The question people should ask is "what is it about Hacker News that makes women uncomfortable and unlikely to participate in? "
  - szatkus 10y ago
    What's wrong with HN community? In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online. Disclaimer: [M27]
    - grzm 10y ago
      "What's wrong with HN community?" I'm going to go kinda meta here. Feel free to dismiss if that's not your bag. "wrong" implies good/bad, which also implies a purpose: good or bad for what? Consider the question "what kind of community should HN be?" From here, let's move on to your statement: "In my perspective it's the most open community I've seen online." It sounds like in your opinion HN should be an open community. Is it as open as it should be? Is the "most open community [you've] seen online" as open as it could be? should be? As you want it to be? Given that there are people that don't feel as welcome as they want to, what does that imply about the community's openness? I don't have the answers to this. I think it's human nature to tend to group, and not every group is for every body. I have seen behavior here that I think is unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for. Maybe that's not the same as open, but I think they're closely related. Does that mean people should toughen up? Be more considerate? Leave if they don't like it? This doesn't match what I would like the HN community to be, but I know I'm relatively new, and that reflects me. Like I said, I don't have the answers.
      - szatkus 10y ago
        Thanks for your comment. As everyone here I have my own idea for the community. But that's just my opinion and what I see here is quite good. As for comments which are "unwelcoming, uncivil, and uncalled for" they are usually downvoted. I use RSS, so usually I'm late to the party. And I rarely upvote anything.
        grzm 10y ago
        I'm glad to see that those kinds of comments are usually down voted as well. And compared to Twitter and what I've heard of Reddit, in general it is pretty good here. As I'm learning how the community works, I've been leaving "showdead" on so I see a lot of stuff, and the different color calls my attention to the worst of it, at least for now. These types of conversations continue to pop up, with varying levels of civility. In your opinion, why is that? Do you think we eventually will find some sort of agreement? Will they diminish? How do they contribute to the community?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
balls187 10y ago
Getting women together to get their perspective on things, sounds good. Asking them about things that pretty much all women are asked about, as if that's the only thing they are qualified to talk about, seems counter.
- Mz 10y ago
  It is part of a series of Q&As. This is not the only installment. Refusing to ask stereotypically "girly" questions is another form of sexism. Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women. Refusing to hear women's voices on the topic is just as problematic as only talking to women about this sort of topic and nothing else.
  - balls187 10y ago
    Except no one is refusing to ask questions, nor refuse to hear women's opinions. > Work-life balance is a concern for both men and women. Yes it is. But the questions were about making the workplace more family friendly, and workplace dating, which to me, feels like a real missed opportunity to share real insight. I get it though--I don't own the topics of discussion. I was just sharing my perspective. TBH, it doesn't really matter what anyone thinks about workplace dating. In the US, HR have policies in place to prevent legal issues. Full Disclosure: My wife and I started dating while we both worked at the same startup.
sn 10y ago
I always have mixed feelings on these types of posts. It is good to ask these questions because there are simply biological issues that the other sex is not going to have personal experiences with. Pregnancy and breastfeeding? I know there are considerations that someone who has not gone through these events (including women without children) are just not going to relate to. We also can't control how people react to us in person and the assumptions that are made based on our appearance, regardless of what are personality is. You aren't going to resolve those issues without identifying what they are in the first place. Personally I would like it if the series was "ask an engineer who is female" rather than "ask a female engineer" though.
- Mz 10y ago
  I also have mixed feelings, but I am trying to be supportive of this effort because it is at least shooting for the right goal, which is building bridges instead of trying to hang men high. One of my favorite professors had an excellent saying: I am the primitive of my way. It kind of encapsulates both the idea that anything worth doing is worth doing badly and also the idea of fail fast and iterate. Perhaps if people keep giving constructive feedback to this initiative in a not ugly way it will evolve into something that more effectively promotes their agenda without so many glaring defects. Perhaps one option would be to change it to "Ask an Engineer" and then have each installment be about some category, such as senior programmers, multicultural engineers, older people, and also sometimes women. So then it could be, for example, "Ask an Engineer: Senior Programmer edition" or "Ask an Engineer: Female edition" or something like that.
  - sn 10y ago
    Yes, I also don't like the 'us vs. them' mentality a lot of women-focused groups seem to have. I really like your idea of rotating through different groups who are statistically underrepresented (not just women.)

snowwrestler 10y ago

The point of this series is that a lot of women engineers already do get asked all sorts of awkward questions, or worse, are subjected to uninformed assumptions. This Q&A series is intended to put information out in a public form to help preempt some of that.