51–60 of 87 posts
Agree.
> Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics
How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?
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…
Women are perhaps the closest distant group that gets undeserved presuppositions thinly-veiled and anecdotal pseudoscience.
The point is that most non-labor intensive jobs don't have such a hard gender preference. Without the loss of generality, my family tree of Soviet citizens were able to be chemists, engineers, doctors, and now software devs just fine. I fail to recognise what IT or playing chess is different to warrant such a huge discrepancy, something doesn't add up.
The fact that discriminating is short-sighted when it come to employment tells me of a deprecated conceptual model that I doubt can truly be resolved through fixing IT alone,
to be blunt, the problem is old because the actions are ineffective.
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.…
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…
Personally I don't care as long as any prospective firefighters can quickly carry a 200 pound unconscious person out of a burning building. For some reason, I suspect that pool of qualified candidates skews male.
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.…
This helps explain to me why, when there is a thread about a woman being mistreated in the workplace, there’s just loads and loads of comments dismissing the concerns and saying she’s overreacting. Quite unfortunately that’s exactly the reaction that leads to those problems persisting.
> HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions) Agree. > Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?
therefore even the virtual presence of something wonderful* being in one's vicinity can have an impact on an individual's emotional state, making the environment feel more "pleasant"
> HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions) Agree. > Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This helps explain to me why, when there is a thread about a woman being mistreated in the workplace, there’s just loads and loads of comments dismissing the concerns and saying she’s overreacting. Quite unfortunately that’s exactly the reaction that leads to those problems persisting.
I have no idea how this helps explain that to you.
edit: on second thought, your comment might be snarking about how a poll is unnecessary to assume that this is a male-dominated space, making me the fool
I once went to an AWS conference and played a game, are there more women or more blind men. After 3 days, I counted more blind men. Nothing about the results above surprises me.
> HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions) Agree. > Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?
Pleasant in the sense that I'd love to see some myths about this being a 'man-only' site dispelled. Should have clarified that!