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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 wor

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? "

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? "