Hi HN,<p>I had a great chat today with a researcher studying different online communities, their users, and their rules.<p>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?<p>(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)<p>Thus, dear HN user, what's your gender?
If you haven't already, check out StackOverflow's Developer Survey. The historical data goes back to 2015.<p>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.
<a href="https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2023/</a>
The one thing I valued most about online communities at least "back in the day" was not knowing this stuff.<p>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".<p>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.<p>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?
Current figures:<p>14 non-binary<p>18 women (counting me)<p>329 men<p>3 prefer to self describe<p>364 total votes, about 5 percent female and 5 percent "other", so roughly 90 percent male.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>Nothing about the results above surprises me.
Being a “data junkie” myself, I would also like to have access to various anonymized statistics for HN users just out of curiosity, but this isn’t possible.<p>See some previous posts:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4397332</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35567986</a>
Notes on survey bias.<p>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.<p>The poll would need to run for a long time since the daily and monthly unique figures are different by order of magnitude.<p>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.<p>The upshot will be that inference from this poll to the HN population will likely be biased.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219581</a>
> HN does not specifically ask for gender in the profile (which is a good thing, IMO, since it's not necessary for the discussions)<p>Agree.<p>> Maybe we are in for a pleasant surprise in terms of demographics<p>How can any such result be pleasant or unpleasant?
Ever since I've started seeing outright discrimination against males in tech, I've adjusted by always answering prefer not to say / other.
As of this comment, there are 465 poll votes in total, but the poll itself has only received 76 votes. Odd that most people who considered it interesting enough to participate in, did not consider it interesting enough to reward or signal-boost.
The vast majority of women I've spoken to all take the same view of tech. "you sit on a computer all day and 'write code'?! How dull!"<p>I'm not entirely sure that the gender discrepancy here is significantly more than reflective of gender preferences, from my very limited sample space.<p>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 don't care. Anybody can use whatever pronouns they want to me. Although I care about the feelings of others who may think different (so I avoid behaving in a way which might hurt them), I personally believe any (not just gender) self-identification is a pointless lie.<p>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.
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 you about their new startup, would IMO rightfully be subject to a fair degree of lag.