7 ms·
Poll: Male or female?
We've had some excellent gender articles on here in the last few days (especially http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm), so I thought it would be interesting to see how the community breaks down.
- tokenadult 17y agoOf course the responses to this voluntary response poll will not yield a reliable picture of the break-down of the whole community, for reasons well known to statisticians. http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420 http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta... http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4582549&tstart=-1 http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4582549&t...
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- tokenadult 17y agoAre you suggesting internet polls are not reliably accurate? They are definitely not reliably accurate as representations of the realities they purport to represent.
- kierank 17y agoThey are definitely not reliably accurate as representations of the realities they purport to represent. Yet certain parts of the news media treat them like proper statistical polls.
- tokenadult 17y agoYet certain parts of the news media treat them like proper statistical polls. Your statement is correct, and that is a regrettable fact about errors among some news media workers. The local TV station I watch most for TV news usually posts polls without any warning, but is pretty good about announcing that their results are "unscientific" after the polls close.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- jrockway 17y agoThis poll is probably meaningless, but it is a good indication of how many people read HN on Sunday afternoon. 80 votes in 20 minutes, or so. Edit: OK, actually 85 in 19 :)
- edw519 17y agoAt the time I voted, it was 96.6% male (143/148). I find it hard to believe that our community (hackers) is 96.6 % male. I don't find it hard to believe that hacker news readership is 96.6% male. Does hacker news "attract" a more male readership? Or is the population already this skewed?
- noaharc 17y agoCertainly both are heavily skewed to males. For example, in my Internet & Web Systems class, there are 25 guys and 3 girls.
- andreyf 17y agoSlightly related PG quote: I didn't realize it till I was writing this, but that may help explain why there are so few female startup founders. I read on the Internet (so it must be true) that only 1.7% of VC-backed startups are founded by women. The percentage of female hackers is small, but not that small. So why the discrepancy? When you realize that successful startups tend to have multiple founders who were already friends, a possible explanation emerges. People's best friends are likely to be of the same sex, and if one group is a minority in some population, pairs of them will be a minority squared. Source: http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html
- babo 17y agoIs that matters online?
- ableal 17y agoThe poll author did forget the 'dog' option (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_youre_a_dog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_y... )
- rufius 17y agoWho cares.
- noaharc 17y agoI take it you don't. Is it because you think there are no meaningful differences across sexes? Really, give this a shot: http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm.
- biotech 17y ago"Is it because you think there are no meaningful differences across sexes?" I agree with the GP, but not with this comment. Obviously there are meaningful differences between the sexes. But there are other ways to group people, as well: - Gender (already covered, here) - Age - Nationality - Ethnicity - Sexual Orientation - Political Orientation - Religious Orientation - Number of Older Siblings - ... the list goes on All of these factors are significant in the sense that they help to establish our unique identity, and there are meaningful differences in each category. Should we poll for each factor? At some point..... well, I can't say it more succinctly than the GP: "Who cares?"
- whughes 17y agoCertainly, we've had polls for some of these (I remember age specifically) in the past, and we'll probably have them again as the user base changes. With the context of an increasing number of gender-related articles, I think this information is valuable.
- rokhayakebe 17y agoWe should care. We like to believe that all our differences do not make a difference, but fortunately and unfortunately they do. For example if YC funds more startups with women you will not see the impact in the next 2 years. But 10 years from now those veterans would have encouraged several younger women to get into technical fields. Everyone will benefit from that. I have had the chance to meet and work with a couple of female programmers, and although I am not a coder I was most certainly thrilled.
- octane 17y agoDo you really need a poll for this? Just like every other tech site it's a bunch of 18-35 year old dudes sitting around clicking reload every 20 minutes.
- nocman 17y agoI think you underestimate at least the top end of that age range. I am quite certain that a number of folks on HN are well above the age of 35. PG is in his 40's, and I'm sure he's not the only one here in that category (and I wouldn't be surprised to find hackers older than that here -- perhaps much older).
- TweedHeads 17y agoNow THAT would be an interesting poll <20 20-30 30-40 40-50 50>
- shermans 17y agoIt's been done. A little over 8% of respondents were 40 or over. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=517039
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoSemi-relevant: http://xkcd.com/385/ http://xkcd.com/385/ EDIT: I've actually seen this in action. I spoke up about it, and got complete incomprehension in return. People really, really don't notice that they have these sorts of attitudes, and it stinks. Related: http://dev.linuxchix.losurs.org/?q=node/10 http://dev.linuxchix.losurs.org/?q=node/10 I'm leaving my gender unspecified.
- radu_floricica 17y agoTrue, though it probably doesn't apply here. Off-topic, I asked the same question on another thread without a response. Other then generic attitude issues, have you ever seen a case of a woman programmer being discriminated against? In my experience, due to their rarity and the environment they tend to be treated very well, both professionally and socially.
- RiderOfGiraffes 17y agoThis is a mine-field, and personally I think you can't win, you can't break even, and you have to play the game. In my experience women programmers are treated very well. However, there's a school of thought that being treated well is being treated differently, and that's what some find so off-putting. I've seen a woman programmer turn up at a meeting and have someone bustle over and say "Gosh, hi, welcome! Nice to see you!" In contrast, everyone else is given a generic "Hi!" and then ignored until they join in. It's that different treatment that can irritate. Something I've heard is "Why can't I just be treated like everyone else?" Perhaps treating everyone very well should be the norm. Too much to hope for, methinks.
- jlees 17y agoExactly. It's little things like the "Hi" above, or like having to bludgeon people with geek talk because - despite your thinkgeek t-shirt and dubious personal hygiene - they still think you're in Marketing.
- lleger 17y agoIt may be an unscientific poll, but if nothing else, it's interesting to see with whom we are interacting.
- djm 17y agoThere is some basic info of the breakdown of users including gender on Alexa, though it only provides info for users with their plugin: http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com It will be interesting to see how that data compares to the poll results.
- zemaj 17y agoI'm female on the internet.
- thesethings 17y agoFemale here, just voted. I just wanted to say I love Hacker News. I'm an introvert and a nerd before I am a female, so I am of course drawn to Hacker News because it's a great place to find other over-sensitive folks who take themselves, their questions, and other peoples' questions very seriously. As others point out again and again, the quality of discourse here is just really high. Secondarily, but still present, I like Hacker News because relative to other community sites it's very female-friendly. HN is mostly based on ideas, not status/gender/age. I do wince and get bummed out whenever I read certain comments here (I've pretty much learned to just not even click threads about the ideal age to get married, what's more important relationships or programming, etc) but even when things make me sad, they're at least not crudely written. Basically HN keeps it pretty civil. Anyway, you folks are great, HN is great, and I think more females will gravitate here for a variety of reasons, most having nothing to do with gender.
- Alex3917 17y ago"I do wince and get bummed out whenever I read certain comments here, [...] but even when things make me sad..." Does reading comments you think are misguided make you sad? I feel like there's an interesting academic study in here somewhere. edit: If the parent comment was made by a guy, would I still be getting downmodded?
- thesethings 17y ago(Just upmodded your question, a decent one.) "Does reading comments you think are misguided make you sad?..." Yeah, kind of. I mean, it's pretty context dependent. First of all, outside of HN, I'd be much less sensitive to stuff I feel is off-base, after all, that's why I'm at HN, it's different, a refuge from a world I'm used to feeling out of place in. (Don't mean to make that sound so dramatic/emo. I like plenty of things outside of HN, but in terms of general-subject tech news, it's pretty unique.) I guess it stings more at HN because there are many people here I highly, highly respect and am inspired by, and a few posters here who I try to follow very closely, as if their HN posts were a feed I subscribed to. When these folks say certain things, it makes my heart sink a little, because in my fantasy, I want to imagine there's room for somebody like me in their view of the world. I wrote something related above, " when you read/hear something about you described as an Other, or somebody who should/does have traits different than you do (example: I don't like fashion.), you feel out of place, something I'd otherwise never feel at HN, a place I usually feel right at home at." I don't want to change the tone about my overall feeling about HN. I think it's great. It's my extremely high opinion of it that gives it the power to make me feel sad sometimes.
- tokenadult 17y agoThe parenting networks that I hang out on even more than I hang out on HN reliably have female majorities in their posters and their readers. Men are quite conspicuous on such groups, so much so that I tend to assume everyone is female, even if the screen name sounds very male, until I'm told otherwise. I've asked before http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553145 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553145 if any of you know of online discussion sites with a more balanced ratio of male and female participants. I didn't get any answers the last time I asked. The most balanced site I participate on is College Confidential, http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/ which doesn't seem noticeably skewed to me one way or the other.
- whatusername 17y agoI can think of two small targeted communities that had a pretty good m/f ratio.. Probably only <3000 members each though. Neither of which exist anymore. One was targeted by location/religion/age -- and the other was kind of similar. So hitting a small niche - High School aged Buddhists in Iowa - means that you identify nicely with the niche whether you are male or female. EDIT: Just remembered a site I stumbled upon one time.. Don't know the full details but seems to be pretty evenly split: http://www.themarriagebed.com/boards/ http://www.themarriagebed.com/boards/
- Alex3917 17y agoMy guess is that some of the various Yahoo! communities are pretty well balanced (certain mailing lists, flickr groups, etc.), but I don't participate in any of them so I have no idea.
- axod 17y ago>> "We've had some excellent gender articles on here in the last few days" Please stop :( The whole "women in tech", Rails porn thing, please just end it now.
- jrwoodruff 17y agohttp://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm
- srn 17y agoSince we're here, if there are women in the SF bay area who want to get together for a bring-your-project-and-work-on-it afternoon/evening, contact me.
- rmdstudio 17y agoCome on ladies! get out and vote!
- ttam 17y agoauch, the current numbers (764 male/37 female) is worse then my school's comp.sci enrollment numbers!
- erlanger 17y agoHN is officially a sausagefest.
- csomar 17y agooops %95 are male, I never estimated it! Thanks for the pool :D
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- GrandMasterBirt 17y agoFunny thing about the ratio, it holds true for developers at my job as well... :)
- tpyo 17y agoI voted both male and female.