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.
I participate for a few reasons:
1.) I'm a 3rd generation techie and that's a fairly rare perspective, particularly for people of my age group (I'm 36). HN is one of the few places online that can appreciate that nuance and why it might matter. Related to this, I'm a woman who can in no way be considered an interloper or someone who doesn't understand the culture or the professions. I'm basically here to offer the perspective that the average HN user might hear from his daughter in 10-30 years when I opine on gender stuff.
2.) It's one of the few places with a decent age spread amongst users. Too many other sites are dominated by people under the age of 30 (to be generous).
3.) It's text based and amenable to long format textual discussions, which are how I prefer to interact online since I joined the WWW in 1993 and grew up with the text based Web.
4.) It's somewhere online where a good chunk of the userbase is more technologically proficient than I am and I like talking to people who know more than me about esoteric subjects.