It's been over a year since a poll of this nature, and HN's landscape/size has significantly changed. I wonder if the predictions of more women coming have proved true (since the previous polls were significantly skewed toward the male gender).
I'm a woman who was originally introduced to HN through Reddit and started reading about a year ago (this is a throw-away account that I will probably not use again.) I don’t really care about startups – I'm a physics graduate student planning on going into academia – but I do care about programming and tech. I have not yet been able to find an active online community that caters to these interests that I would describe as being "female-friendly." At HN, at least, sexist jokes are usually downvoted/discouraged because of their lack of content, which is more than I can say for Reddit. I generally enjoy HN except when the community decides to discuss gender, which it seems to do multiple times a week, even when it's only tangentially related to the article and despite it already having been beaten to death on this very site a million times over. These conversations invariably turn into, "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)? Dudes speculate." This is the most interesting topic to hackers, apparently.
I guess it's good to know that HN just feels like a woman-free space because it practically is, in contrast to sites like Reddit that feel that way even with ~2/5 of the users being female.
I guess it doesn't need to be said that a lot of us are carrying baggage from adolescence. Even when I'm dating somebody, I easily fall into thinking that no woman will ever want me and that deep down all women are fascists who despise weakness, want to see the strong humiliate the weak, and yearn to be instruments of this brutal hierarchy of male power.
My therapist likes to remind me (and I'm paraphrasing heavily here,) "Dkarl, you've grown up, and the girls have grown up, too. You're not a dumb teenage boy trying to date dumb teenage girls anymore."
I encourage the women on HN to say their piece on gender issues when they come up, even when your comments don't fit into the prevailing conversation. Don't worry about where your comments fit, how they influence the conversation, or how people misunderstand them or hijack your points. Just put them out there, because I think the majority of men here are well-intentioned and pretty self-aware when it comes to our own thinking about women; we just don't know how women experience working with us and what we can do to improve that experience.
Well, okay, you've got a point there. The only woman on my team confided in me that she wants more challenging technical work, and she hasn't talked to our boss about it because she has an image of him as being unapproachable and moody, while all the men he has worked with think he's just the most easy-going and tolerant person imaginable. (The other women do, too, but my teammate is the first woman who has reported to him. The other women are peers.)
But when I say self-aware, I mean that cognitive psychology is a favorite topic here, and people here have read a lot about the importance of intuition in every kind of thinking, and how everything about a person influences our intuition about them whether we want it to or not. Height, race, sex, age, attractiveness... and even worse, that our biases in intuition are mostly beyond the reach of introspection... and of course we can't dispense with intuition in dealing with people, so we can't really be fair, we can only be skeptical of our intuition, check it against evidence whenever possible, and try to observe our biases and compensate for them.
At least, I'm pretty sure that picture emerges clearly from the various links that have been posted here, or anywhere else that geeky guys hang out. I think we have the problem of understanding the nature of bias licked. Honestly, I think the biggest two problems are
1) An attitude problem stemming from personal wounds and resentment over the perceived advantages of women. Some men really are deeply angry with women because of their own personal disappointments.
2) Sheer ignorance about how women experience our behavior in the workplace. Knowing how we might be screwing up isn't sufficient to recognize when we're screwing up, as the example of my boss shows. We need outside input. The internet is a perfect place for women to share their experiences, since they can be anonymous if they like, and they don't have to talk to people they have complicating relationships with.
In our collective male defense: Even the best males have been struggling with the "How do women work?" question since the dawn of time, so you can imagine it is magnified when you introduce that topic to a group of males that disproportionately answer that question incorrectly.
I'd suggest not reading too much of it as "sexism" (even though it is) and more of "the other view". For every female physics grad there is a male nurse sharing the feeling, I guarantee that.
Regardless, I think it takes a unique individual to be on the minority side of the gender/field of study equation and applaud you for continuing to have the courage to satisfy your own desires.
"In our collective male defense: Even the best males have been struggling with the "How do women work?" question since the dawn of time, so you can imagine it is magnified when you introduce that topic to a group of males that disproportionately answer that question incorrectly."
In the words of one of my advisors - "among one the first things that was ever painted on the wall of some damp cave during the dawn of humanity was, I'm sure, a question that amounted to 'what the hell do women want?'"
It's not sexism so much as it is confusion that emerges from the fact that men and women are wired very differently, think differently, are socially coniditioned differently, and most importantly - communicate differently. Naturally a community with so many men is going have some who are prone to wonder and ask outloud.
Please don't read that much into sexism. I'm a fellow geek who follows a bit different paradigm in all that I do.
And a basic fact before anything else: Women and men ARE different. There, I said it; the pink elephant in current American society.
Now, I've met men and women who are all over the place. Some are in sciences, others in humanities, others have their own business. And alongside that, I'm a dom. I have a submissive, and live with 3 other people. Both us guys are dating her, and the other guy is dating the other gal in the house. Is it "different" than most relationships? Yes, but we work.
In our relationship, some would see what I do as abuse. Ive put bruises on her the size of an apple, bound her for hours, cut her with knives, chocked her until she passed out, and other acts. She trusts me completely in that I could do anything. Yet, if she asked me for something, I would move the Earth to do so.
It would be just as unfair to make comments like "Why arent women in the sciences? how did we screw them up?" jut as it would be "Men are smarter in the sciences than women". When you have a culture say that you are supposed to do better in X instead of Y, of course there's bias.
And go figure, Im more of a supporter of womens' rights than most women are just for the fact I am a dom.
These conversations invariably turn into, "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains
The common speculation is that there's something "weird" with men's brains, in that men go to extremes (both positive and negative) more often than women. (And you have to be something of an outlier to be on HN). That may or may not be more palatable, but there actually is some decent evidence to support it.
GENTLEMEN: we are the ones with the weird brains. Testosterone, even in the womb, rewires us for dominance, hierarchy, focus (obsession), spacial acuity, etc., so we dominate in executives, generals, Nobel prize winners, and hackers. On the other end of the spectrum we pretty much own the social failure space: homelessness, severe mental illness, prison occupancy, murder, drug dealing, financial malfeasance, war, corruption, and on and on.
Our obsession with aggregate differences between the sexes is pointless and probably counterproductive since we spend our days dealing with individuals, not aggregates.
I need some people to do some heavy lifting work - I don't have long to establish suitability, time is money and all, what rough sieve should I apply to a list to get the most strong/fit people?
I'm going with 20 something males.
We often deal with groups and have to make decisions without full information or without a long time to ruminate.
"Which babysitter will be better?" The grandmother or the young single male teen? Snap decision, I think I know who most would choose. Such choices are based on prejudice developed through group behavioural observation; it's a shortcut that mostly works.
First, if you read the threads where this stuff comes up, you'll see that most of these discussions are in the context of work and dating, both situations where personal exposure goes way, way beyond what you can learn from stereotypes. In particular, the desire to abstractly characterize women reflects a sad attempt to depersonalize, out of fear, what should be a very personal, individual relationship. (Don't try to tell me that the guys driving these discussions are all dealing with aggregates of women -- they wish they were dealing with aggregates of women, because dealing with individual women is too confusing and distressing for them.)
Second, hiring a babysitter is a terrible example of making a snap decision based on age and sex. I've never heard of parents hiring a babysitter without personal familiarity or references. Lots of grandmothers are incredibly ignorant about child care, even downright irresponsible. Hell, in areas where meth is popular, I bet grandmothers do a lot more meth than 13-year-old boys.
Hiring guys to do heavy lifting is actually a decent example, but I've never seen any discussions on the internet about how to pick good workers from the crowd of day laborers hanging out near Home Depot. Do you take the young, wiry guy or the gray-haired guy who's built like a tank? Are tattoos a bad sign? You haven't read any discussions like that on HN. No, instead, people talk about how to have a deep understanding of women's sexual desires (scary and bad) and moral scruples (even more scary and bad) without actually knowing a woman.
Excellent paper. The real evolutionary feedback loop in play here is sexual selection, not natural selection. Women evolved men and men evolved women. Women select for status, because that provides for better children and better care for their children. That means the chief has more wives because he has more status and resources. Half the men die because they are feeble or in adventures. Men select for fertility, hence beauty and youth. I suppose all this worked pretty well in a tribal society, but we now have a serious imbalance as a civilization. As I said above, men in jails and unchecked aggression and greed in our leaders.
It is now up to the women to do a little directed social evolution to get us a more equitable civilization. I think we men have done quite well in evolving out women, so I have great faith if the future of civilization.
People are very strange in general, but on a site where most people are men, questions about the ways women behave that seem strange to men are going to get discussion.
Of course this is an interesting topic to hackers. Hackers are mostly men and typically (big generalization) tend to approach interpersonal relations in a relatively analytical mindset. Understanding half of all humanity (on average of course, let's be PC here) is important, especially given our innate drive toward behavior conducive to reproduction.
Actually, it would be nice if a member of the opposite sex who understood this mindset could help us out from time to time, but I'd imagine this must be a tiresome exercise, something like how tiresome it is to explain to businesspeople how programmers work.
If truly understanding women was the goal, there are a whole bunch of books that explain a whole lot... but as far as I can tell, nobody here reads them, they prefer to rely on opinions and anecdotes. Which, as any uber-rational mind will tell you, is not the same as data.
Could you elaborate more on what you feel is "female-friendly?"
I thought the commenter went on to explain herself on that point (by discussing downvoting of sexist comments).
One could define female-unfriendly as a place where the conversation takes place as if no females are present (or could possibly be present). Think male-locker-room.
But: There are many guys who detest that kind of thing also, and judging from the downvoting of crap comments that goes on in HN, they are making their voices heard.
It's worth noting that I know more men who self-identify as feminist than women.
It's not like she was holding HN up as a paragon of "female-friendliness." I wanted a "perfect-world" perspective, as opposed to "why HN is better than Reddit, while still not being all that great." It seems she's moved on though, alas, as her perspective no doubt would have made interesting reading.
As far as your other points go, I've been in my shares of locker rooms and I certainly don't detest locker-room banter, nor do I self-identify as a feminist, but to each his or her own I suppose.
These discussions on HN tend to spiral to the point where I don't really want to be a part of them. But I guess talking about something is always better than the alternative, no matter how uninformed or flawed the discussion is.
I think the "issues" category on the geek feminism wiki does a good job of summarizing the "female-unfriendly" things[1]. Objectification and a "sexualized environment"[2] is what the poster refers to can be common on other sites. Sexism[3] and essentialism[4] is something that generally takes the form of attitudes or opinions, and therefor is less obvious. I see this here on HN in various forms e.g. this comment[5] saying "women are less likely than men to engage in deeply focused solitary activities". "Othering"[6] is something you can see even on this page.
I see this here on HN in various forms e.g. this comment[5] saying "women are less likely than men to engage in deeply focused solitary activities".
I don't understand this. Are you saying that statements like that are objectively and obviously false, that they're meaningless, or that their truth or falsehood is irrelevant because it's not something that should ever be discussed?
Really, "essentialism" being entirely false would be a surprising result. Men and women have these very different hormones flowing through our bodies, which have no effect whatsoever on our mental processes?
I wouldn't say that the statement is meaningless, but I would say it's both false and irrelevant to the lack of women in technology. I also think this is a view which is common among people who don't know the subject very well and is similar to to what has been used to explain why women couldn't do other things which are now commonplace.
I think essentialism is problematic as a concept because of it's different usages and I only used it because it was featured in the wiki. I much more comfortable talking about sex and gender. Sex being your biological properties and gender being your cultural or socially constructed identity. I see a lot of argument offering flaws in the sex or gender of women as explanation, but not very many considering the flaws in tech culture.
I'm not saying there aren't differences in biology between women and men, I just think these are grossly overshadowed by the difference in gender. I also believe gender to be variable. For example I believe encouraging women to take risks, e.g. with an startup incubator, could change their social role even if it would be "based in" biology (which I don't think it is in this case).
For the record I do think these things should be discussed, I just wished the discussions were better. Like I've expressed before I find that when it comes to social sciences, the bar lowers significantly for what's considered a good argument.
> "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)?"
Actually, generally it's men who are the weird ones. Males have higher variance on pretty much all measures. This means that e.g. there are more mentally retarded males than females and more genius males than females. Dismissing potential biological influences out-of-hand is the same as dismissing empiricism altogether.
Don't worry, the discussion about women is because people (aka men) are having a hard time getting laid, keeping a woman, dealing with the woman they have or the feelings they have about her -- or, on the other hand, understanding the appeal of women to start with.
In my experience, those men prefer to throw up their hands and act as if women are mystical instead of totally explicable (like all human beings are, if you look closely enough). That way they don't have to admit they're too lazy/incapable of understanding anyone who has a different viewpoint and priorities ;)
The "I'm ultra logical and uber rational" posture is part and parcel of it.
My "counterargument": women who complain about sexism in technology are just fatties and uglies who wish they could find a real man instead of getting pump and dumped by the occasional desperate loser.
We can try to lower the status of people we disagree with, or we could actually have a rational discussion which might teach us something.
(Oh, very clever! You've preemptively applied the "loser" label to people who aspire to rationality. I guess I lose the status competition.)
Way to keep it classy and prove me wrong. Very rational and measured of you. It served your purposes exactly.
Are you one of the people who engage in conversations around "Women: Does society screw them up or is there just something weird with their brains (on average of course, let's be PC here)? Dudes speculate." ?
Would it have been more acceptable if he had said "women who complain about sexism in technology are just having a hard time getting laid or keeping a man"?
You want rationality, look at pickup artists. They have (questionable at best) goals, and they do whatever it takes to achieve them with maximum effectiveness.
After checking out that PUA stuff, it appears to me that the goals you call "questionable" are not grounded in rationality at all - it's all about not meeting the emotional needs of the women involved, and they mostly smell like men whose emotional needs have not been met by the prior women in their life (maybe even starting with their first woman, their mother). Lots of "popular" PUAs just seem vengeful to me, and I take that as a sign that it's their emotions that ultimately motivate them.
I think orangecat's point is that rationality and the moral correctness are distinct (assuming you haven't solved the is-ought problem). "Rationality" is just taking actions which are most likely to lead to your goal, whatever that goal may be.
Now, that still leaves us to explain the correlation between (a) rationality in the pursuit of relationships and (b) having "questionable" goals like pure sex rather than love. And I think it can be explained this way:
First, sex is a much easier to define and measure goal; it's hard to gather data about how well you have achieved ephemeral things like "love". This makes it less amenable to rational attack. Second, people who are initially rational are more likely to see the rather unpleasant realities of love (tracing it back to evolution-driven competition) and become cynical of even the existence of love (and so settle for sex). Third--and I think this is close to what you were getting at--men who have been shunned by women may become so bitter that they don't really want to the love of a woman while still acknowledging that they want sex.
"Don't worry, the discussion about women is because people (aka men) are having a hard time getting laid, keeping a woman, dealing with the woman they have or the feelings they have about her..."
They would do better than discussing those issues here... whatever insight they get is going to be grossly skewed by the 15:1 m/f ratio...
Odd, I'd never noticed any such discussions. Maybe the stories I read don't get those kinds of comments, but I'll be on the lookout - I don't like that kind of thing either. (I'm male)
I assumed the referent was to the "why aren't women in CS?" articles that crop up with some regularity.
I would hesitate to necessarily call these sexist. The psychological aspect of that question might appeal to both male and female hackers, and I don't think the acknowledgment of a fact (i.e., the difference in enrolled CS students) is somehow sexist.
The one thing you have to remember about voluntary response polls is that they tell you essentially nothing about the underlying reality in the population of interest.
The classic example in any good statistics textbook is the Literary Digest poll to predict the outcome of the 1936 presidential election in the United States.
That's all true. But honestly, I would expect this poll to be biased toward over-counting woman. I mean, if I saw a poll to find out how many red-heads (like me) were on HN, I think it would catch my eye and I'd be more likely to click.
Was just about to say the same - some stats show more women partake in polls (offline) but online many women are put off by them esp. in a male dominated zone, such as this...
But the current stats show this is a hugely male dom site...
Female. I must have missed the predictions (that more women were expected) and what they were based on. Anyone care to refresh my so-called memory?
FWIW: My experience has been that women are at least as ugly about men as men are about women. While going through my amicable divorce (and occasionally since then), I was badly spammed with really hostile, anti-male "jokes" from women I knew who had some fantasy I wanted to read this bitter crapola. (Can you say "projection"?) I don't think either gender is at fault for the current state of things. I think the struggle over sexual mores and changing gender roles is largely situational and both sides end up victimized by it while they each somehow think the other group is getting over.
However, humans - male, female, and variant - often lust for the anatomical features of other humans, and the associated emotions often trump any rationality. And there is danger in not noticing this. And a surprising number of humans, here and elsewhere, don't seem to notice it.
I almost didn't bother with a response since it should be obvious by my handle. But then I remember years ago on Yahoo! chat when I had a handle ending with the word "Man" and (allegedly straight) guys would still try to cyber with me. So now I take nothing online for granted :-)
It's a mix of both, I suppose. However, what I meant to convey was that it is not too surprising that there aren't many women on a website that would take some degree of technical knowledge to stumble upon. Given the differential between men and women who study technical subjects.
I guess it's good to know that HN just feels like a woman-free space because it practically is, in contrast to sites like Reddit that feel that way even with ~2/5 of the users being female.