Would guess only 5.3% of YC readers are female. And would say, it's posh, not "real world," and it's not comfortable even though I'm a very strong woman - and a welder.
I think the average demographic here is the standard software engineering team in the US, unfortunately. I hope I'm wrong. There are some high profile HN'ers that are women (e.g. DoreenMichele comes to mind).
Fun fact: in eastern Europe (and Russia too?) the gender dynamics of software engineering are much more gender equal compared to the US/EU. Probably other STEM disciplines as well. I'm not sure about welding though.
I'm getting a bit side tracked with my thoughts, it's just that I think it ties into bigger issues.
I remember once being in a feminism class, as the only male, making a case for getting women into stem and it fell on deaf ears. I think that's also in part because women (and men for that matter) that take feminism classes tend to skew liberal artsy. I just happen to have a liberal artsy side and a STEM side (and a cool feminism teacher that was patient enough for all my naive questions so I felt emotionally safe to take her class).
I wish there were more women in the conversation but unfortunately there aren't. The last company I worked for happened to have an equal 50/50 gender split. That was cool. It confirmed what I thought about men and women: ignore gender and focus on personality and their thoughts. I've often been in situations where any form of stereotypes have been thrown out of the window and my last employer was one of them. It's beautiful.
Unfortunately, HN seems to be too big for that. The culture needs to shift and I don't have much of a clue how. I think in part it's with how women versus men are socialized here. Boys that are socially excluded tend to go towards computers. Girls don't really seem to be socially excluded that often compared to boys? Just brainstorming, I might be totally off.
> Are there actually any women in this conversation? I find many of the comments at YC to be obnoxiously male dominant and condescending, this comment section included. It's been frustrating me for quite a while now.
I'm curious how you find them frustrating. When I was reading them, I wasn't quite sure what to think about it.
By the way, I've used a throwaway because of my submission to HN, not because of this comment. I thought I was on my pseudonym account. I have autism (diagnosed in my mid thirties) and I think many people here are on the spectrum, which is what my submission is about.
I think this would be extremely generous to the demographic here. Women get paid for their time and get to solve problems they might be interested in at work, so it makes sense for them to want to be there. Women do not get paid to be condescended towards on a tech bro website like hacker news.
Even if women might read the front page, I do not know why they would want to participate in the conversation on this site, honestly. It is hard to articulate the totality of the issue to someone who participates and does not see it. This community *is* obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
> a tech bro website like hacker news
HN doesn't feel like that to me. Whenever I'm here, I have my brainstorm and science hat on. Nothing more, nothing less. To call HN a tech bro site, it seems to be a bit of an attack and not conductive towards the discussion. I guess the definition of tech bro differs. Also, being a male that doesn't care too much about its own gender, I am probably "well-suited" to not care.
In my case, I draw the line if they're also into sports (like going to a soccer match or something). Probably others don't. But that's why I have a bit of an issue with words like "tech bros". Like, do tech bros even lift? Most don't seem to. The characterization is too vague.
> Women do not get paid to be condescended towards
That makes sense, and I can imagine how it is experienced as such. It's sad to see.
I remember being on a subreddit once and experiencing it the other way (r/womenover30 or something). When I said something I was downvoted. If a woman said the same thing, she wasn't. I can imagine some women feel that a bit here. Perhaps a lot, but my imagination fails there. I get that it sucks.
> This community is obnoxiously male and condescending, to put it mildly.
What does it mean to be obnoxiously male? I've seen so many different ideas on what it means to be male that I honestly stopped giving a shit about what people mean. It's too confusing, despite me being a hetero cis white male.
I guess it's the autism. Whenever it comes to gender (masculinity and femininity) I mostly see rhetorical nonsense (e.g. some people saying that being emotional sensitive is a feminine quality. It is most likely true that more women are like that, but I just find that whole frame of thinking toxic as the word "femininity" almost implies it's inherent, which I think is highly debatable - I can go on like that for a while, also about masculinity). Could you be a bit more factual so I can make my own conclusions?
I mean, I've been to a feminism class and while that was really useful, I still think the typology is silly.
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That it is seen as condenscending, that depends. With regards to condescending on women in this thread, I see that. I've also seen it to some extent in other threads. But condescending in general? No. I'm not sure if that's what you mean, but you write a little hand wavy at times. I mean, the points you make still stand, but I think they'd stand better without the labeling things so strongly that are clearly a strong interpretation that I don't understand how you get to it.
I do get the general vibe of the average Hacker News person when the subject is about dating. Comments tend to steer towards hopelessness, and that particular way of being I found is strongly correlated with being out of touch with how women look at certain things. I get the sense when women write something the average HN commenter has an issue to not look past their own trauma in order to listen to what women are saying. In that sense, I can see it's off putting.
> Re: tech bro
The tech bro thing comes across most apparently in the pro-VC slant of this site (inextricable, I know). There is a high proportion of believers in a fantasy meritocracy where current wealth concentration is justifiable due to the sheer genius of "founders". This is very much a tech-bro way of thinking.
The way HN regularly reduces socio-political problems into a technological gap is another tech-bro "thing". When someone suggests that a country switch its currency to crypto to eliminate state corruption, or suggests that biometrics scanners be installed at ports of entry to eliminate slavery and humans rights abuses, that is a tech-bro opinion. It is different from a blue collar environment because the people on this website are extremely insulated from the social issues that come up on here. Nonetheless, they feel like they have an obvious solution to a version of the problem that they've concocted in their head based on a 2 second glance at a headline. It reminds me of this Adam Savage video that I think is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP4CKn86qGY
> Re: obnoxiously male
This is exemplified by the high confidence and combativeness in this and other similar comment sections on HN, but let's just talk about this comment section.
Commenters here are confidently asserting that the author's lived experience is wrong because of a certain interpretation of the words that they typed in the article. When she says that someone made comments that made her feel othered, the reaction here is to disbelieve and downplay. That is very much a "obnoxiously male" way of approaching things. In more balanced spaces, the presumption would be that this blog post was made for a reason and that the person who made it is valid and rational by default. Nobody here has any additional information, and they are asserting that their interpretation of her words is correct even though they are heavily influenced by their own biases of gender, class, and otherwise.