Ask HN: How often women read HN? Participate? |
Ask HN: How often women read HN? Participate? |
I will note that some of the work I've done under nyms has hit the front page here and it was disheartening to see across hundreds of comments how many people just assumed whoever was behind the project was a guy. It was rare for anyone to be gender neutral and that was as radical as it got. No one assumed the author of that project was a woman.
Oh well.
I don't hide, but I also don't bring it up much and my name being pretty gender neutral probably avoids a lot of frustrating moments.
"After sifting through near to three million pull requests submitted on GitHub, they found – against their expectations – that code written by women was approved at a slightly higher rate than that composed by men, 78.6 percent to 74.6 percent, respectively. That’s roughly an extra 120,000 pieces of code.
"Nevertheless, there was a depressing caveat: this rule only applied if their gender was unidentified. If female coders’ gender was known, their overall pull request acceptance rate fell from 78.6 percent to 62.5 percent. This appears to suggest that women may in fact be better coders, but are automatically discriminated against simply because of their gender."
Apart from that, there are endless examples of women being harassed, stalked, assaulted, and even killed because of their gender. Is it any wonder that many might prefer not to reveal their gender and enjoy the benefits of relative equality when they have the ability to do so, such as in an online forum like HN?
Really, you'd have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the existence of sexual harassment. Just on HN, articles about it float to the front page at least one or twice a month, which is why I really have to wonder if you are just trolling by asking that question.
[1] - http://www.iflscience.com/technology/women-are-seen-better-c...
Note: I do not mean someone should set up a page long google form that asks for age and gender. I mean someone who has at least a small amount of experience with census' should set up a detailed and lengthy census which asks questions with nuance. I don't think I have the capability to do this, or I would.
I also post links sometimes, not often.
For Russians - m Russian - it's clear from my name that I'm a girl. not sure about non Russians.
>women may in fact be better coders
How can someone make such a blanket statement like that with so many confounding variables. Do you think it possible that funding sources and expected (and socially acceptable) results might have something to do with the conclusion these sorts of studies come to? Do you think there are grants available for researchers who would interpret this data differently?
This article leaves one with the impression that women are 'better' at coding. So, using the above trick, do i believe men are 'better' at coding than women? Nope. Nor do I believe the opposite. So on that basis alone one should be very skeptical about this link.
I was referring specifically to this site. Outside of reddit and maybe youtube comments I don't remember seeing any offensive comments lately. Maybe it's time to move to some better sites!
No, I'm not trolling you.
On online sexual harassment: The women who are in the spotlight are normally harassed for their political beliefs (which they are very flamboyant about), not for their gender. People who air out their political beliefs publicly are harassed whether they are a males rights activist, feminist, conservative, etc.
You can't just say that women's contributions fell and then not show the comparable male change.
"For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong."
Yours is a good point, however, that seems to have been missed in the reporting on this study. The men's acceptance rates did also drop (significantly even) when their gender was revealed. So it appears that men might also benefit from having a gender-neutral identity.
Also, the request was for examples of sexual harassment on HN, and I can't help but notice that you didn't provide any and instead changed the subject.