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Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#31

Post by jd0 »

xerophtye wrote: post #10

I am confused, where exactly do you see this hostility? I thought the hacker community is welcome to everyone. In fact, i am not a white male. Most people i know aren't white males. A very large number of visitors of HN are probably not white males. But we're all respectful towards each other here. In fact of all the forums online, I actually find HN to be the least biased/racist/sexist. Just the other day, that post…

I know discussion here is reasonable, and that's partially why I brought it up here on HN vs anywhere else, but check my recent comment for clarification:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#32

Post by thenerdfiles »

SamReidHughes wrote: post #20
jd0 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was about to reply to the original post but thank-you for editing and clarifying a bit. I have to say, though, even if your first paragraph is true, do you have any empirical evidence that native African language speakers have a harder time with computer science than native speakers of other non-English languages? Secondly, when looking at those of African descent who were not specifically born and raised speaking…

Stop worrying about computer science specifically -- it's no different in engineering fields, and worse in the sciences. The reasons are not specific to CS.

With CS it's a more concrete problem because both the Tools and the Results count as linguistic artifacts, and there is a clearer correlation with languages and linguistic praxis.

EDIT: Removed "Conceptual Tools", etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#33

Post by jd0 »

This post was very briefly on the top of /ask but now it's gone from that page altogether... honestly that's fucked up!

It seems like it was a moderator decision, older posts with less comments and upvotes remain, why was this post removed?

please ask info@ycombinator.com

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#34

Post by angersock »

krstck wrote: post #26
angersock wrote: post #8

http://learncodethehardway.org/ http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ http://mitpress.mit.edu/sicp/full-text/book/book.html There. That should do it--for our part, we'll try to be friendly. What more do you want? EDIT: http://railsgirls.com/ is actually pretty great to be fair.

I decided that I wanted a new career in programming. I learned Rails through Michael Hartl's (wonderful) tutorial. Several months later, I had a job as a programmer. My being female has never, ever come up. In fact, of the five programmers in my shop, two are female. Any interested party can learn the skills, and then all you have to do is find someone you can help. There's a huge demand for programming skills, but a…

Next step (providing you haven't already done so!) is to spread the good word and help train the next generation. :)

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#35

Post by thenerdfiles »

xerophtye wrote: post #10

I am confused, where exactly do you see this hostility? I thought the hacker community is welcome to everyone. In fact, i am not a white male. Most people i know aren't white males. A very large number of visitors of HN are probably not white males. But we're all respectful towards each other here. In fact of all the forums online, I actually find HN to be the least biased/racist/sexist. Just the other day, that post…

There's a huge social network that makes up programming which exists outside of HN and networks like it. That said, what about the problems of Big Companies? These companies largely continue to allow these "hostilities" to persist. It's the problem of "mixed talent".

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#36

Post by gmays »

'Hostile' is quite a leap and makes more assumptions than are worth addressing. You claim hostility, but it sounds like you might mean underrepresentation?

Regardless, it's for the same reasons that the NFL and NBA are 'hostile' to Asians, Indians, and any other underrepresented group: they're not. It's just a function of what people are culturally exposed to growing up and what we're conditioned to see.

It's silly to think a community that openly accepts whites, Asians, and Indians is hostile to blacks because we're a wee bit darker. Go to a black neighborhood and ask how many startups failed or people who gave up programming because they felt the community was hostile to them. It even sounds silly, right?

I'm black and the only reason I'm involved in the tech community is because my mom started working at AT&T 40+ years ago as a punch card operator and worked her way up. If she hadn't brought her work computer home when I was a kid in the 90's I probably wouldn't have fallen in love with computers. She also set aside the money to buy me a computer on a 5-year Sears layaway plan or something crazy like that (BTW who buys a computer at Sears?! This guy). She could barely afford it, but it was important to her because she knew what it meant. And she only knew it because she unintentionally ended up in the tech world.

Culture, exposure, and financial ability are the primary factors in my experience.

Might there be some discrimination? Sure. Everybody encounters discrimination at some point, some more than others, but such is life. What's sad is when people expect discrimination so they tend to 'see' it everywhere.

I've actually never heard a woman or another black person complain about discrimination in this community and I've never seen it myself. I've also never thought about it until now, which is a good sign, but maybe I'm just lucky. YMMV.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#37

Post by serf »

jd0 wrote: post #29
drill_sarge wrote: post #14

Seriously stop make these accusations without any proof. Where is the hostility? Just because there are a lot of white males™ doesn't mean there is hostility against other people.

To clarify, check my recent comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

you're citing statistics without proof of their relevance to this discussion.

by hostility, it seems that you actually mean "Why do blacks and women represent a minority in computer science?"

Computer science has always been an inbetween between engineering and hard sciences--because of that many laymen were employed to do menial computer tasks early in history. This was, perhaps , one of the first chances for laymen to jump onto a scientific industry which turned out to be semi-permanent.

Since we know that education paved the way for the empowerment of minorities, could it be that the statistics that you're referencing are really just moving as a function of women becoming wider dispersed and accepted within all sciences, rather than just the engineering ones?

Perhaps the statistical anomaly that you cite is really a glimmer of hope for women. Computer science is not the only field that readily accepts them now-a-days, and perhaps those numbers actually indicate a migration across a wider array of science and engineering fields that were not at one time available for them, rather than a disappearance of women all together in STEM.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#38

Post by jd0 »

gmays wrote: post #36

'Hostile' is quite a leap and makes more assumptions than are worth addressing. You claim hostility, but it sounds like you might mean underrepresentation? Regardless, it's for the same reasons that the NFL and NBA are 'hostile' to Asians, Indians, and any other underrepresented group: they're not. It's just a function of what people are culturally exposed to growing up and what we're conditioned to see. It's silly t…

Thanks for your response. In reference to your addressing the word "hostile" check this recent comment I made to try and clarify the use of that word:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6879195

That comment only addresses women though - but hostile was more-so a trigger word than what I actually meant. I'm trying to address societal disadvantages faced by certain groups - these are not consciously hostile but they are structurally hostile.

Your mother was obviously not only intelligent but also had a lot of grit and determination that many do not have, a trait which is essential for success in any scenario - and it's clear that you did benefit from that. Most people do not have this level of skill or innate drive to succeed. many don't have the parental guidance which you had to follow that path. I'm simply asking, how can the hacker scene adjust to not only help non-white non-male groups, but to stop driving them away in increasing numbers?

"but such is life."

Yes, but it can change!

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#39

Post by waps »

jd0 wrote: post #16
carsongross wrote: post #11

Well, one thing that could be done to change this would be to stop complaining about how one of the most meritocratic groups of people in the history of mankind is hostile, and get forking. The code is thataway: https://github.com/

Your attitude is childish and short-sighted. When certain groups are -by default- disadvantaged compared to a dominant group, just saying "go do work like I did" - is meaningless.

Really ? On systems where people are essentially identified by their email adress and/or username ?

Why don't you tell me. One of these is female (and pretty accomplished in the open source community), one of these is non-white ... which is which ?

* thegrendel.abs

* tille

* pgquilles

If you can't, obviously the reason is not just racism. On mailinglists, github and irc, skin color and sex don't exist. If there is a difference, MAYBE it's the result of companies not hiring these people to work on open source, or because sex and ethnicity influences whether and how much you work on open source (actually I think it's more about location. Open source contributors almost always live close to universities that were very involved in the creation of open source 20-30 years ago. Because those universities are effectively only in USA and northwest Europe, the ethnicity is skewed, but there are plenty of mostly white countries that are massively underrepresented in open source projects).

As to why people are hostile to other groups, a very significant portion of them are either teenagers in highschool or university students (and even then, skewed towards the younger univ students). They're not a welcoming group, no, that's true. But they are pretty universally not welcoming, asking for someone's sex/color on lkml ... is not something you want to do if you want your reputation to survive. Hell, there are flamewars that started because of statements that someone was somewhat richer in kilograms than medically advisable, when it was absolutely true.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the hacker scene so hostile to women and black people?

#40

Post by xerophtye »

thenerdfiles wrote: post #35
xerophtye wrote: post #10

I am confused, where exactly do you see this hostility? I thought the hacker community is welcome to everyone. In fact, i am not a white male. Most people i know aren't white males. A very large number of visitors of HN are probably not white males. But we're all respectful towards each other here. In fact of all the forums online, I actually find HN to be the least biased/racist/sexist. Just the other day, that post…

There's a huge social network that makes up programming which exists outside of HN and networks like it. That said, what about the problems of Big Companies? These companies largely continue to allow these "hostilities" to persist. It's the problem of "mixed talent".

Umm... I can't think of any color-examples at the moment, but as for the females and big companies thing, well, Yahoo's CEO is a female. Google's Security head is a female (last i checked).

Apart from big companies, DefCon's team has a lot of females in it. So the "HackerScene" isn't just about males

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