5 ms·

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 awa

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 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!)

Tichy 14y ago
What if I told you that I find the term sausage fest offensive and it makes me feel unwelcome in this community?
- kintamanimatt 14y ago
  How so?
- schallis 14y ago
  The phrase is a little crude but I see no reason for it to cause offence to any particular gender more than another.
  - VLM 14y ago
    Possibly Tichy is a vegan. Another hostile meme environment: "icanhazcheezburger"
    - icebraining 14y ago
      Well, the type of sausage wasn't specified; I hear soy-based vegetarian sausages aren't all that bad.
- fnordfnordfnord 14y 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.
  - iambibhas 14y ago
    Couldn't have put it better.
  - Tichy 14y ago
    What if I were a woman complaining about sexism in the industry, would you give me the same advice? Several female bloggers have complained about the "don't be so uptight" reply they received to their complaints...
    - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
      Are you a woman? If so, some people are crass, boorish, crude, jerks even. That doesn't make them right, but try to develop some tolerance. I don't mean suffer in silence either. It's fine to let someone know how you feel, and you definitely shouldn't tolerate, or allow people to make you feel unsafe. But it's not (IMO) fine to demand that everyone always cater to your extreme sensitivity. And, some people are just jerks, even if you can get them to shut up it doesn't make them nicer. If you are both a woman and crass, and the person persists in annoying you, maybe try telling menstruation-themed jokes or anecdotes. But, if you are both a woman and crass, chances are you don't need me to tell you how to rid yourself of unwanted company.
- danilocampos 14y 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.
  - jholman 14y ago
    I have a dream, that one day it will be rare to hold sexist perspectives like the one you just described. In my dream world, the importance of people feeling welcome is independent of that person's gender or that person's sex. I don't know what you meant to say, but what you said is that gender is among the things that you consider most important about participants, when deciding if their feelings matter. The type of bigotry you just exhibited is way, way down the list of priorities. But most of the higher priorities are complicated and nuanced[0][1], but the thing you said is just straight-up wrong. [0] E.g. affirmative action is complicated and nuanced. [1] E.g. assuming a randomly-selected conventional-looking women at a tech convention is not a developer is... totally horrible, but also rational, given the distribution.
    - danilocampos 14y ago
      ...or I was responding appropriately to an obvious troll. But don't let me deny you your savory helping of sanctimony there.
      - jholman 14y ago
        Yeah, well, my analysis, then and now, is that you were replying inappropriately to a semi-trollish comment by someone who's probably redeemable. And actually, if counter-trolling is how you frame your comment, then I have to say, you're doing it wrong. The correct response to trolls is to silently downvote. This is called "don't feed the trolls", and it's the right strategy because genuine trolls are encouraged by counter-trolling, and this would result in more noise and less signal. Alternately you can try to say something that will be useful to other people, while still downvoting and ignoring the troll.
        14y ago
- lutusp 14y 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 14y 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.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y 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.
  - why-el 14y ago
    If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared.
    - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
      I'm in Europe. North Korea doesn't scare me. The only people who should legitimately be concerned are those in South Korea (and to a much lesser degree Japan). I find international politics interesting. Fear isn't really a motivation.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared. North Korea isn't itself very scary. What is scary is the fact that over decades they have threatened to attack everyone around them, and the surrounding powers have responded by extending food and economic aid, in a repeating pattern. The North Koreans know this -- they know it works -- so they do it again and again, and their citizens remain captives of a throwback regime. That's what's scary.
dominicmauro 14y 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.
- lutusp 14y 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.
  - dominicmauro 14y ago
    I wasn't using "scared" literally, and I assume the person I was replying to wasn't, either. Web sites aren't generally actually frightening. [Insert your own punchline here]
redidas 14y 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.
- yaddayadda 14y 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/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenInTechnologyInTheMuslimWorld.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenIn...
- mnicole 14y ago
  I'll quote an excerpt from Lea Verou's exquisite article on sexism (http://pensieve.verou.me/post/47360690848/what-is-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 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100516.gif
lutusp 14y 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_hand 14y 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.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > 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. That's circular. It tries to say that women are a minority in tech because they drop out in larger numbers than men, because ... they're a minority. I don't this logic stands up under scrutiny. The remedy is not to care about that. If I had to choose between being scared and having a boring life in which my gifts weren't fully exercised -- well, that would be much more scary. So even if we compare scary things, as I see it, being a member of a minority is rather low on the scary list.
VLM 14y 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.
- icebraining 14y ago
  There are more influences than the parents, though.
stratosvoukel 14y 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 . ?
- kintamanimatt 14y 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.
  - stratosvoukel 14y ago
    I cant see how you can have a poll for both gender/sexuality. If you want to be inclusive it would easily have more than 50 option due to the simplicity of the HN polls (also Male/Female , internationally, are more usually used to describe sex not gender ) :/ It may have been flagged to death due to other factors as well (eg. homophobia?, people not being comfortable with it etc)
  - Fargren 14y ago
    I think there was a strong bias for people who see themselves as not conforming to the norm to vote, so the would have been over-represented in the poll.
Dewie 14y 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.

Tichy 14y ago

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

kintamanimatt 14y ago
How so?
schallis 14y ago
The phrase is a little crude but I see no reason for it to cause offence to any particular gender more than another.
- VLM 14y ago
  Possibly Tichy is a vegan. Another hostile meme environment: "icanhazcheezburger"
  - icebraining 14y ago
    Well, the type of sausage wasn't specified; I hear soy-based vegetarian sausages aren't all that bad.
fnordfnordfnord 14y 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.
- iambibhas 14y ago
  Couldn't have put it better.
- Tichy 14y ago
  What if I were a woman complaining about sexism in the industry, would you give me the same advice? Several female bloggers have complained about the "don't be so uptight" reply they received to their complaints...
  - fnordfnordfnord 14y ago
    Are you a woman? If so, some people are crass, boorish, crude, jerks even. That doesn't make them right, but try to develop some tolerance. I don't mean suffer in silence either. It's fine to let someone know how you feel, and you definitely shouldn't tolerate, or allow people to make you feel unsafe. But it's not (IMO) fine to demand that everyone always cater to your extreme sensitivity. And, some people are just jerks, even if you can get them to shut up it doesn't make them nicer. If you are both a woman and crass, and the person persists in annoying you, maybe try telling menstruation-themed jokes or anecdotes. But, if you are both a woman and crass, chances are you don't need me to tell you how to rid yourself of unwanted company.
danilocampos 14y 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.
- jholman 14y ago
  I have a dream, that one day it will be rare to hold sexist perspectives like the one you just described. In my dream world, the importance of people feeling welcome is independent of that person's gender or that person's sex. I don't know what you meant to say, but what you said is that gender is among the things that you consider most important about participants, when deciding if their feelings matter. The type of bigotry you just exhibited is way, way down the list of priorities. But most of the higher priorities are complicated and nuanced[0][1], but the thing you said is just straight-up wrong. [0] E.g. affirmative action is complicated and nuanced. [1] E.g. assuming a randomly-selected conventional-looking women at a tech convention is not a developer is... totally horrible, but also rational, given the distribution.
  - danilocampos 14y ago
    ...or I was responding appropriately to an obvious troll. But don't let me deny you your savory helping of sanctimony there.
    - jholman 14y ago
      Yeah, well, my analysis, then and now, is that you were replying inappropriately to a semi-trollish comment by someone who's probably redeemable. And actually, if counter-trolling is how you frame your comment, then I have to say, you're doing it wrong. The correct response to trolls is to silently downvote. This is called "don't feed the trolls", and it's the right strategy because genuine trolls are encouraged by counter-trolling, and this would result in more noise and less signal. Alternately you can try to say something that will be useful to other people, while still downvoting and ignoring the troll.
      - 14y ago
lutusp 14y 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 14y 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.

UnoriginalGuy 14y 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.
- why-el 14y ago
  If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared.
  - UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
    I'm in Europe. North Korea doesn't scare me. The only people who should legitimately be concerned are those in South Korea (and to a much lesser degree Japan). I find international politics interesting. Fear isn't really a motivation.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > If North Korea scares you, then you really, really want to be scared. North Korea isn't itself very scary. What is scary is the fact that over decades they have threatened to attack everyone around them, and the surrounding powers have responded by extending food and economic aid, in a repeating pattern. The North Koreans know this -- they know it works -- so they do it again and again, and their citizens remain captives of a throwback regime. That's what's scary.

dominicmauro 14y 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.

lutusp 14y 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.
- dominicmauro 14y ago
  I wasn't using "scared" literally, and I assume the person I was replying to wasn't, either. Web sites aren't generally actually frightening. [Insert your own punchline here]

redidas 14y 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.

yaddayadda 14y 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/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenInTechnologyInTheMuslimWorld.aspx http://www.hanselman.com/blog/HanselminutesPodcast203WomenIn...
mnicole 14y ago
I'll quote an excerpt from Lea Verou's exquisite article on sexism (http://pensieve.verou.me/post/47360690848/what-is-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 http://www.smbc-comics.com/comics/20100516.gif

lutusp 14y 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_hand 14y 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.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > 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. That's circular. It tries to say that women are a minority in tech because they drop out in larger numbers than men, because ... they're a minority. I don't this logic stands up under scrutiny. The remedy is not to care about that. If I had to choose between being scared and having a boring life in which my gifts weren't fully exercised -- well, that would be much more scary. So even if we compare scary things, as I see it, being a member of a minority is rather low on the scary list.

VLM 14y 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.

icebraining 14y ago
There are more influences than the parents, though.

stratosvoukel 14y 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 . ?

kintamanimatt 14y 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.
- stratosvoukel 14y ago
  I cant see how you can have a poll for both gender/sexuality. If you want to be inclusive it would easily have more than 50 option due to the simplicity of the HN polls (also Male/Female , internationally, are more usually used to describe sex not gender ) :/ It may have been flagged to death due to other factors as well (eg. homophobia?, people not being comfortable with it etc)
- Fargren 14y ago
  I think there was a strong bias for people who see themselves as not conforming to the norm to vote, so the would have been over-represented in the poll.

Dewie 14y 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.