We've had some excellent gender articles on here in the last few days (especially http://denisdutton.com/baumeister.htm), so I thought it would be interesting to see how the community breaks down.
Female here, just voted.<p>I just wanted to say I love Hacker News.<p>I'm an introvert and a nerd before I am a female, so I am of course drawn to Hacker News because it's a great place to find other over-sensitive folks who take themselves, their questions, and other peoples' questions very seriously. As others point out again and again, the quality of discourse here is just really high.<p>Secondarily, but still present, I like Hacker News because relative to other community sites it's very female-friendly. HN is mostly based on ideas, not status/gender/age.<p>I do wince and get bummed out whenever I read certain comments here (I've pretty much learned to just not even click threads about the ideal age to get married, what's more important relationships or programming, etc) but even when things make me sad, they're at least not crudely written. Basically HN keeps it pretty civil.<p>Anyway, you folks are great, HN is great, and I think more females will gravitate here for a variety of reasons, most having nothing to do with gender.
Semi-relevant: <a href="http://xkcd.com/385/" rel="nofollow">http://xkcd.com/385/</a><p>EDIT: I've actually seen this in action. I spoke up about it, and got complete incomprehension in return. People really, really don't notice that they have these sorts of attitudes, and it stinks.<p>Related: <a href="http://dev.linuxchix.losurs.org/?q=node/10" rel="nofollow">http://dev.linuxchix.losurs.org/?q=node/10</a><p>I'm leaving my gender unspecified.
>> "We've had some excellent gender articles on here in the last few days"<p>Please stop :( The whole "women in tech", Rails porn thing, please just end it now.
Of course the responses to this voluntary response poll will not yield a reliable picture of the break-down of the whole community, for reasons well known to statisticians.<p><a href="http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tstart=36420" rel="nofollow">http://mathforum.org/kb/thread.jspa?threadID=194473&tsta...</a><p><a href="http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4582549&tstart=-1" rel="nofollow">http://mathforum.org/kb/message.jspa?messageID=4582549&t...</a>
This poll is probably meaningless, but it is a good indication of how many people read HN on Sunday afternoon. 80 votes in 20 minutes, or so.<p>Edit: OK, actually 85 in 19 :)
There is some basic info of the breakdown of users including gender on Alexa, though it only provides info for users with their plugin: <a href="http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/ycombinator.com</a><p>It will be interesting to see how that data compares to the poll results.
The parenting networks that I hang out on even more than I hang out on HN reliably have female majorities in their posters and their readers. Men are quite conspicuous on such groups, so much so that I tend to assume everyone is female, even if the screen name sounds very male, until I'm told otherwise.<p>I've asked before<p><a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553145" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=553145</a><p>if any of you know of online discussion sites with a more balanced ratio of male and female participants. I didn't get any answers the last time I asked. The most balanced site I participate on is College Confidential,<p><a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/" rel="nofollow">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/</a><p>which doesn't seem noticeably skewed to me one way or the other.
Since we're here, if there are women in the SF bay area who want to get together for a bring-your-project-and-work-on-it afternoon/evening, contact me.
Do you really need a poll for this? Just like every other tech site it's a bunch of 18-35 year old dudes sitting around clicking reload every 20 minutes.