Poll: What are the gender demographics of HN?
Hi HN,
I had a great chat today with a researcher studying different online communities, their users, and their rules.
During that discussion, it occurred to me that while HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions), it would nevertheless be interesting to learn who is hanging out here. Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics?
(This question is not affiliated with any research and is just posed to sate my own curiosity! I cannot see your votes unless you specifically comment)
Thus, dear HN user, what's your gender?
86 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 148 ms ] threadSee some previous posts:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986
About 5% women, it is interesting how little things change.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38031363
Still only 5% woman
If I had to guess, the vast majority are males in the 35-50 range.
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, the military, or any other male dominated field Dr. Inclusion?
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 the United States are women (depending on how volunteer vs. career firefighters are counted). I remember that statistic because StackOverflow's female respondent rate hovers around ~5%. "Women are more likely to run into burning buildings than what I'm doing now" is the kind of gallows humor that gets me through the day.
There are also advocacy groups for other gender/work minority combinations, like male nurses and caretakers.
[1] https://www.hqmc.marines.mil/Portals/61/Docs/FOIA/Reading-Ro...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_firefighting
Edited: typos
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.
And... if you were following any of those fields, you'd find gender inclusion is also an issue. Tech definitely gets more attention in a tech centric forum like HN, and usually (because $$) gets more attention from the general interest press, but the issues are everywhere, with fairly similar discussions.
Your take, is a bad take. Things are civil. They don't also need to look like two robots talking to an oven.
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.
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.
I would guess that you don’t hear it because you don't pay attention to news concerning those domains, at least as it relates to gender inclusion, as gender inclusion is an active issue in each of them.
https://www.yourcentralvalley.com/news/education/education-m...
https://www.achrnews.com/articles/147486-welcome-women-into-...
https://www.hsaj.org/articles/21721
https://www.pressdemocrat.com/article/news/public-safety-car...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/09/21/hire-fema...
https://www.lexipol.com/resources/blog/police-culture-and-wo...
https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2023/01/military-must-recr...
https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2022/12/19/...
What do you mean? It basically hasn't changed at all, the only thing that changed was the messaging but not anything significant. The ratio of women in engineering related fields like programming has been pretty steady the past 30 years.
Well uh, isn’t this the reason why this exists in the first place? We are on the subdomain of a startup accelerator.
I don’t like with most of them either, especially those that loudly complain about not being able to legally siphon my data without my consent because of the GDPR.
But we are on their turf after all.
Nothing about the results above surprises me.
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/
I could genuinely be interacting with people as persons without being biased about them. It was the great equalizer and part of what drew me towards "the hacker's manifesto".
Most of us I think fail to understand what an immense treasure of justice anonymity or at least pseudonymity is. It sucks that the modern internet financially is surviving as a result of fighting against these values.
I disagree with you about knowing people's gender's being a good thing. Look at what people say and do and get to know and then hate or like them to your heart's content. There are few places left where you can meet people and get to know them without a profile pic or a reddit post like this HN post tells you the same exact things that bias us in real life and result in so much strife and injustice.I hated places where people asked "A/S/L?" as you can tell, what do you think of petitioning to ban asking such info to the general HN audience?
Thus no, such info shouldn't be banned.
If it is a subjective comment and personal experience is relevant, the commenter can disclose that detail there and then. However, where fact or analysis of information is involved, it is the correctness and quality of what is said that matters not who said it.
Which isn't the case for everything, and if it is the case, it isn't done always (most of the time).
> You are wanting to put people in boxes and stereotype as if they're not capable of compensating for bias
I am not. Capability doesn't matter if they aren't even aware of their own bias or don't care.
> understanding others' perspective.
No, relevance?
> However, where fact or analysis of information is involved, it is the correctness and quality of what is said that matters not who said it.
Even if something is correct the information they give might be selective while neglecting other perspectives because of their bias, may it be on purpose or not.
Tldr: I think you portrait people as perfectly self aware and free of self interest, which isn't the case on reality which is exactly why groups of people show biases.
It's another thing to have anonymized statistics about the community.
Honestly curious why downvotes?
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.
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.
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
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.
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 was a homemaker for a couple of decades. I spent 5 years and 3 months working at a Fortune 500 company. I have since done freelance work and I'm a blogger.
I haven't spent a lot of time in "the work place" -- by which I mean heteronormative assumptions that the only real work is paid work and women's work doesn't count. My place of work for much of my adult life was my home, and not in a "work from home" sense.
Anyway, I'm not being snarky. I'm just some demographic outlier who thinks a lot about how gender interacts with societal expectations about work and my ideas about it generally fall outside the Overton Window, so I say a lot less than I used to because it tends to be pointless drama where everyone wants to accuse me of something while not seeming at all interested in what I'm trying to say.
But I thank you for your well wishes.
Then when women make claims about discrimination in the workplace in a manner which finds its way to this website, the same men who would have dismissed them in the workplace will dismiss their claims of discrimination in comments here. This leads to an echo chamber of men saying to each other that discrimination against women isn’t happening, when in reality they just don’t see it from their position.
I mention in a separate comment that there is strong reasons to believe this survey is unrepresentative of the HN population, but say it was representative both right now and 14+ years ago. Here are a few things worth baring in mind when making the above inference:
1. Did HN cover the same population now that it did 14+ years ago?
2. Did the survey 14+ years ago include the same options? Were participants equally likely to identify with the given options?
3. The sampling mean in both cases will have significant error. Differences ought to be outside of at least 2 standard deviations to be considered significant.
There was variation in poll results, but my recollection is the variation was something like 96 to 99 percent male. At some point, I settled on a figure of "roughly 98 percent" as a good faith estimate.
I have a Certificate in GIS and a relatively strong math background for the general population, though not for HN, and I know a little CSS and HTML, but I'm not really a programmer, I'm not perceived of as "a tech person" by the HN crowd, etc. I feel I "belong"/fit but it's pretty clear to me most people feel I don't.
When I hit something like 2000 karma under my old handle -- and probably the top 3 people on the leaderboard all had about 50k at the time -- I began getting weird comments that suggested to me I was viewed as "prominent for a woman" on HN, though the bottom of the leaderboard was probably around 10k at the time.
I'm a big fat nobody in the real world and was nowhere near qualifying as having "a lot" of karma for HN and yet comments seemed to suggest people found me noteworthy. So I spent some time keeping private data to try to sort out what the heck was going on.
Those records are long lost and I'm disinclined to say too much about them publicly, but I mention them to say I did track data of some sort related to gender and HN membership for a time.
Things have changed over time and commenting as openly female is less drama for me than it used to be. There are many, many confounding factors that make it impossible to determine how much that is cultural change related to gender and how much that's somehow "me"/my relationship to the site, but I've observed that I notice openly female participants more often and topics seem to include more articles by and/or about women in a way that seems like inclusion is more normalized than it was 14 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.
The data here generally fits with my personal observations and impressions that HN is more diverse than it used to be. I don't feel it matters a whole lot if it's off by a bit. It makes little difference to me whether the "non male" demographics is double, triple, quintuple or septuple the roughly 2 percent it once was. I feel and see the difference and presumably others do too that they show up more, percentage-wise.
I commented because I'm probably the only person who has a history of tracking gender-related data on HN and I know how this goes: People see the low figures and start having fits about sexism.
I'm just trying to provide context. Yes, HN skews very strongly male. It used to skew even more strongly male according to my personal observations and polls of this sort.
FWIW.
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"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_are_wonderful
see how that's problematic?
I'm sure you've seen some things here and there, but truly, saying "discrimination against males in tech" is a problem is quite ridiculous.
But I'd bet that discrimination against hiring men into a tech position is probably the norm.