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Current figures: 14 non-binary 18 women (counting me) 329 men 3 prefer to self describe 364 total votes, about 5 percent female and 5 percent "other", so r

Current figures: 14 non-binary 18 women (counting me) 329 men 3 prefer to self describe 364 total votes, about 5 percent female and 5 percent "other", so roughly 90 percent male. When I joined, polls showed it to be more like 98 percent male. So non-male membership/participation has possibly quintupled in the 14+ years I've been here. This fits with my general impression as a participant. Nice to have a little data. It's been a while since I've seen one of these polls.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
This helps explain to me why, when there is a thread about a woman being mistreated in the workplace, there’s just loads and loads of comments dismissing the concerns and saying she’s overreacting. Quite unfortunately that’s exactly the reaction that leads to those problems persisting.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I have no idea how this helps explain that to you.
  - SequoiaHope 3y ago
    I’ve spent enough time at places like google and spoken to other women about how they are treated by men in those workplaces to understand why I’m seeing the exact same behavior from most users here. Men in our culture are more trusting of other men and more dismissive of claims made by women, in my experience. When I see an article about a woman who was mistreated by men in her workplace and her claims were dismissed by other men, and then I see threads here filled with men dismissing her claims, everything falls in to place when I see that this place is 95% men. There just aren’t enough women’s voices here to explain what’s really happening, and the men here demographically are the same men that contribute to these problems in the workplace.
  - smegsicle 3y ago
    i think he's pointing out how a male-dominated culture would respond with mansplaining about one's responsibility to adapt to the workplace, where a woman-dominated culture might focus more on the emotional toll of such failing to adapt edit: on second thought, your comment might be snarking about how a poll is unnecessary to assume that this is a male-dominated space, making me the fool
    - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
      Well first off I’m a woman. But I wasn’t talking about women focusing on “the emotional toll of failing to adapt”. I’m talking about the fact that in our culture men are more likely to trust other men than women, and more likely to dismiss the claims made by women. This directly leads to discrimination against women in the workplace. The specific ways this happen can often seem subtle from the outside, but the persistence and prevalence of this is clearly felt by women in tech. There is nothing women can do to adapt to the fact that men won’t listen to them, men need to change their behavior. Women who try to adapt by being more assertive can be labeled as aggressive and will be dismissed all the same. Then when women make claims about discrimination in the workplace in a manner which finds its way to this website, the same men who would have dismissed them in the workplace will dismiss their claims of discrimination in comments here. This leads to an echo chamber of men saying to each other that discrimination against women isn’t happening, when in reality they just don’t see it from their position.
    - DoreenMichele 3y ago
      According to the profile, TaylorAlexander is a she/her pronouned person. I was a homemaker for a couple of decades. I spent 5 years and 3 months working at a Fortune 500 company. I have since done freelance work and I'm a blogger. I haven't spent a lot of time in "the work place" -- by which I mean heteronormative assumptions that the only real work is paid work and women's work doesn't count. My place of work for much of my adult life was my home, and not in a "work from home" sense. Anyway, I'm not being snarky. I'm just some demographic outlier who thinks a lot about how gender interacts with societal expectations about work and my ideas about it generally fall outside the Overton Window, so I say a lot less than I used to because it tends to be pointless drama where everyone wants to accuse me of something while not seeming at all interested in what I'm trying to say.
usgroup 3y ago
> When I joined, polls showed it to be more like 98 percent male. So non-male membership/participation has possibly quintupled in the 14+ years I've been here. I mention in a separate comment that there is strong reasons to believe this survey is unrepresentative of the HN population, but say it was representative both right now and 14+ years ago. Here are a few things worth baring in mind when making the above inference: 1. Did HN cover the same population now that it did 14+ years ago? 2. Did the survey 14+ years ago include the same options? Were participants equally likely to identify with the given options? 3. The sampling mean in both cases will have significant error. Differences ought to be outside of at least 2 standard deviations to be considered significant.
- DoreenMichele 3y ago
  I originally joined in July 2009. HN was a lot smaller back then and demographic polls were somewhat common at first, at least comparatively. They later became less common. There was variation in poll results, but my recollection is the variation was something like 96 to 99 percent male. At some point, I settled on a figure of "roughly 98 percent" as a good faith estimate. I have a Certificate in GIS and a relatively strong math background for the general population, though not for HN, and I know a little CSS and HTML, but I'm not really a programmer, I'm not perceived of as "a tech person" by the HN crowd, etc. I feel I "belong"/fit but it's pretty clear to me most people feel I don't. When I hit something like 2000 karma under my old handle -- and probably the top 3 people on the leaderboard all had about 50k at the time -- I began getting weird comments that suggested to me I was viewed as "prominent for a woman" on HN, though the bottom of the leaderboard was probably around 10k at the time. I'm a big fat nobody in the real world and was nowhere near qualifying as having "a lot" of karma for HN and yet comments seemed to suggest people found me noteworthy. So I spent some time keeping private data to try to sort out what the heck was going on. Those records are long lost and I'm disinclined to say too much about them publicly, but I mention them to say I did track data of some sort related to gender and HN membership for a time. Things have changed over time and commenting as openly female is less drama for me than it used to be. There are many, many confounding factors that make it impossible to determine how much that is cultural change related to gender and how much that's somehow "me"/my relationship to the site, but I've observed that I notice openly female participants more often and topics seem to include more articles by and/or about women in a way that seems like inclusion is more normalized than it was 14 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. The data here generally fits with my personal observations and impressions that HN is more diverse than it used to be. I don't feel it matters a whole lot if it's off by a bit. It makes little difference to me whether the "non male" demographics is double, triple, quintuple or septuple the roughly 2 percent it once was. I feel and see the difference and presumably others do too that they show up more, percentage-wise. I commented because I'm probably the only person who has a history of tracking gender-related data on HN and I know how this goes: People see the low figures and start having fits about sexism. I'm just trying to provide context. Yes, HN skews very strongly male. It used to skew even more strongly male according to my personal observations and polls of this sort. FWIW.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

This helps explain to me why, when there is a thread about a woman being mistreated in the workplace, there’s just loads and loads of comments dismissing the concerns and saying she’s overreacting. Quite unfortunately that’s exactly the reaction that leads to those problems persisting.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I have no idea how this helps explain that to you.
- SequoiaHope 3y ago
  I’ve spent enough time at places like google and spoken to other women about how they are treated by men in those workplaces to understand why I’m seeing the exact same behavior from most users here. Men in our culture are more trusting of other men and more dismissive of claims made by women, in my experience. When I see an article about a woman who was mistreated by men in her workplace and her claims were dismissed by other men, and then I see threads here filled with men dismissing her claims, everything falls in to place when I see that this place is 95% men. There just aren’t enough women’s voices here to explain what’s really happening, and the men here demographically are the same men that contribute to these problems in the workplace.
- smegsicle 3y ago
  i think he's pointing out how a male-dominated culture would respond with mansplaining about one's responsibility to adapt to the workplace, where a woman-dominated culture might focus more on the emotional toll of such failing to adapt edit: on second thought, your comment might be snarking about how a poll is unnecessary to assume that this is a male-dominated space, making me the fool
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Well first off I’m a woman. But I wasn’t talking about women focusing on “the emotional toll of failing to adapt”. I’m talking about the fact that in our culture men are more likely to trust other men than women, and more likely to dismiss the claims made by women. This directly leads to discrimination against women in the workplace. The specific ways this happen can often seem subtle from the outside, but the persistence and prevalence of this is clearly felt by women in tech. There is nothing women can do to adapt to the fact that men won’t listen to them, men need to change their behavior. Women who try to adapt by being more assertive can be labeled as aggressive and will be dismissed all the same. Then when women make claims about discrimination in the workplace in a manner which finds its way to this website, the same men who would have dismissed them in the workplace will dismiss their claims of discrimination in comments here. This leads to an echo chamber of men saying to each other that discrimination against women isn’t happening, when in reality they just don’t see it from their position.
  - DoreenMichele 3y ago
    According to the profile, TaylorAlexander is a she/her pronouned person. I was a homemaker for a couple of decades. I spent 5 years and 3 months working at a Fortune 500 company. I have since done freelance work and I'm a blogger. I haven't spent a lot of time in "the work place" -- by which I mean heteronormative assumptions that the only real work is paid work and women's work doesn't count. My place of work for much of my adult life was my home, and not in a "work from home" sense. Anyway, I'm not being snarky. I'm just some demographic outlier who thinks a lot about how gender interacts with societal expectations about work and my ideas about it generally fall outside the Overton Window, so I say a lot less than I used to because it tends to be pointless drama where everyone wants to accuse me of something while not seeming at all interested in what I'm trying to say.

usgroup 3y ago

> When I joined, polls showed it to be more like 98 percent male. So non-male membership/participation has possibly quintupled in the 14+ years I've been here. I mention in a separate comment that there is strong reasons to believe this survey is unrepresentative of the HN population, but say it was representative both right now and 14+ years ago. Here are a few things worth baring in mind when making the above inference: 1. Did HN cover the same population now that it did 14+ years ago? 2. Did the survey 14+ years ago include the same options? Were participants equally likely to identify with the given options? 3. The sampling mean in both cases will have significant error. Differences ought to be outside of at least 2 standard deviations to be considered significant.

DoreenMichele 3y ago
I originally joined in July 2009. HN was a lot smaller back then and demographic polls were somewhat common at first, at least comparatively. They later became less common. There was variation in poll results, but my recollection is the variation was something like 96 to 99 percent male. At some point, I settled on a figure of "roughly 98 percent" as a good faith estimate. I have a Certificate in GIS and a relatively strong math background for the general population, though not for HN, and I know a little CSS and HTML, but I'm not really a programmer, I'm not perceived of as "a tech person" by the HN crowd, etc. I feel I "belong"/fit but it's pretty clear to me most people feel I don't. When I hit something like 2000 karma under my old handle -- and probably the top 3 people on the leaderboard all had about 50k at the time -- I began getting weird comments that suggested to me I was viewed as "prominent for a woman" on HN, though the bottom of the leaderboard was probably around 10k at the time. I'm a big fat nobody in the real world and was nowhere near qualifying as having "a lot" of karma for HN and yet comments seemed to suggest people found me noteworthy. So I spent some time keeping private data to try to sort out what the heck was going on. Those records are long lost and I'm disinclined to say too much about them publicly, but I mention them to say I did track data of some sort related to gender and HN membership for a time. Things have changed over time and commenting as openly female is less drama for me than it used to be. There are many, many confounding factors that make it impossible to determine how much that is cultural change related to gender and how much that's somehow "me"/my relationship to the site, but I've observed that I notice openly female participants more often and topics seem to include more articles by and/or about women in a way that seems like inclusion is more normalized than it was 14 years ago. Or even 10 years ago. The data here generally fits with my personal observations and impressions that HN is more diverse than it used to be. I don't feel it matters a whole lot if it's off by a bit. It makes little difference to me whether the "non male" demographics is double, triple, quintuple or septuple the roughly 2 percent it once was. I feel and see the difference and presumably others do too that they show up more, percentage-wise. I commented because I'm probably the only person who has a history of tracking gender-related data on HN and I know how this goes: People see the low figures and start having fits about sexism. I'm just trying to provide context. Yes, HN skews very strongly male. It used to skew even more strongly male according to my personal observations and polls of this sort. FWIW.