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Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#41

Post by WillPostForFood »

grepLeigh wrote: post #14
zer8k wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive Ah yes the old and tired argument comes out again. Since there are 50% men and 50% women in the world why doesn't tech look the same? Cool opinion though...it's so 2015. Almost vintage! I particularly enjoyed the part where you imply it's a bad thing. Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing…

Well, you do hear about those things (welding, house building, firefighting, policing, the military). For example, the United States Marine Corps is slowly integrating some basic training and has a few co-ed companies [1]. This was such a far-fetched idea in the 90s that Ridley Scott made a movie about it starring Demi Moore (G.I. Jane, 1997). Firefighting is another excellent example [2]. 7-11% of firefighters in th…

GI Jane was about a imaginary Navy special operations unit that was a stand in for the Navy SEALs. There are still no female Navy Seals, and it is still far-fethced except for the generally declining standards across the armed forces.

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#43

Post by deely3 »

anonymoushn wrote: post #36

After ThoughtWorks emailed me saying they wouldn't hire male candidates I've decided to move on from being male.

Mmm.. Strange, I have feeling that some faces on https://www.thoughtworks.com/about-us/leaders are AI generated.

Honestly curious why downvotes?

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#44

Post by Incipient »

The vast majority of women I've spoken to all take the same view of tech. "you sit on a computer all day and 'write code'?! How dull!"

I'm not entirely sure that the gender discrepancy here is significantly more than reflective of gender preferences, from my very limited sample space.

This poll will have a predictable outcome. I'd rather see a poll of women on why they're not in tech - no interest, peer pressure, "boys club", etc.

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#45

Post by qwerty456127 »

I don't care. Anybody can use whatever pronouns they want to me. Although I care about the feelings of others who may think different (so I avoid behaving in a way which might hurt them), I personally believe any (not just gender) self-identification is a pointless lie.

I voted for non-binary but it isn't exactly what I mean, as far as I know. I would rather vote for N/A, NULL, ANY or something like that if there was an option.

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#46

Post by anonymoushn »

lolinder wrote: post #39
anonymoushn wrote: post #36

After ThoughtWorks emailed me saying they wouldn't hire male candidates I've decided to move on from being male.

IANAL, but if you have that in writing, it seems like you have a massive employment discrimination lawsuit just waiting for a lawyer.

All the lawyers I talked to said it sounded great and I should look for some other lawyer who's willing to do it.

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#47

Post by [deleted] »

grepLeigh wrote: post #12

If you haven't already, check out StackOverflow's Developer Survey. The historical data goes back to 2015. Strangely, it looks like the 2023 StackOverflow survey opted not to collect gender among their demographics responses. IIRC, the breakdown is approximately 90% male, 5% female, 1-2% non-binary, 1-2% prefer not to answer or prefer writing their own response. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/

[deleted]

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#48

Post by usgroup »

Notes on survey bias.

HN community is international and from [1] it is around 3.5M monthly unique users. A representative sample would need to be stratified since it is unlikely that — for example — the proportion of female readers will be the same across countries.

The poll would need to run for a long time since the daily and monthly unique figures are different by order of magnitude.

Further, there are many times more lurkers than posters [1], and only a fraction of posters will answer this poll (I will not, for example). I would expect something like a >99% non-response, implying strong self selection amongst responders.

The upshot will be that inference from this poll to the HN population will likely be biased.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#49

Post by imiric »

zer8k wrote: post #11
3c6bYDXLMj wrote: post #5

We aren’t in for a pleasant surprise. If this userbase is anything less than 70% male I’d eat my hat. Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive. But HN, being a community of old farts lamenting about the good old days (if I have to read another comment about how great it is that the site hasn’t changed in 20 years I’lll scream), as well as techno-libertarians wanting to tell…

> Tech has obviously in general has made considerable progress in being more inclusive Ah yes the old and tired argument comes out again. Since there are 50% men and 50% women in the world why doesn't tech look the same? Cool opinion though...it's so 2015. Almost vintage! I particularly enjoyed the part where you imply it's a bad thing. Why don't we hear about that with welding, house building, firefighting, policing…

Or, conversely, for the female-dominated fields: preschool teachers, nurses, hairdressers, etc.

This whole endeavour to have equal representation of all genders in all aspects of life completely misses the mark that career choices and most life decisions are rooted in personal preferences and interests, and that on a fundamental level males and females (and other genders as well, I suppose) are different. And that this is OK.

Not only that, but it doesn't address the main issues of discrimination and wage gap, but pretends it will somehow fix itself if we maintain a perfect balance of gender representation.

And why stop there? Why focus on gender and race only? Shouldn't we also have equal representation of all nationalities, religions, hair colors, eye colors, and whatever other human criteria?

The entire DEI trend is absurd, and ironically only serves to further divide us into arbitrary buckets.

Re: Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?

#50

Post by DoreenMichele »

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.

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