I expect that not very many women will out themselves in response to your question, considering how much negative attention such an outing often results in.
Yep. Bringing up your gender on the Internet, even just matter of factly to correct someone's assumption is a quick way to find yourself and whatever point you were making derailed.
I don't hide, but I also don't bring it up much and my name being pretty gender neutral probably avoids a lot of frustrating moments.
"After sifting through near to three million pull requests submitted on GitHub, they found – against their expectations – that code written by women was approved at a
slightly higher rate than that composed by men, 78.6 percent to 74.6 percent, respectively. That’s roughly an extra 120,000 pieces of code.
"Nevertheless, there was a depressing caveat: this rule only applied if their gender was unidentified. If female coders’ gender was known, their overall pull request
acceptance rate fell from 78.6 percent to 62.5 percent. This appears to suggest that women may in fact be better coders, but are automatically discriminated against
simply because of their gender."
Apart from that, there are endless examples of women being harassed, stalked, assaulted, and even killed because of their gender. Is it any wonder that many might prefer not to reveal their gender and enjoy the benefits of relative equality when they have the ability to do so, such as in an online forum like HN?
Really, you'd have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the existence of sexual harassment. Just on HN, articles about it float to the front page at least one or twice a month, which is why I really have to wonder if you are just trolling by asking that question.
Correlation != causation. Might it be possible that women who play the woman card are not as capable as those who let their code speak for their ability?
>women may in fact be better coders
How can someone make such a blanket statement like that with so many confounding variables. Do you think it possible that funding sources and expected (and socially acceptable) results might have something to do with the conclusion these sorts of studies come to? Do you think there are grants available for researchers who would interpret this data differently?
One trick I find helpful is reversing the results of a study and seeing if I still believe it.
This article leaves one with the impression that women are 'better' at coding. So, using the above trick, do i believe men are 'better' at coding than women? Nope. Nor do I believe the opposite. So on that basis alone one should be very skeptical about this link.
I was referring specifically to this site. Outside of reddit and maybe youtube comments I don't remember seeing any offensive comments lately. Maybe it's time to move to some better sites!
That's not very comparable. People who reveal their gender online are a very specific set. Not many people (male or female) reveal their gender online.
On online sexual harassment: The women who are in the spotlight are normally harassed for their political beliefs (which they are very flamboyant about), not for their gender. People who air out their political beliefs publicly are harassed whether they are a males rights activist, feminist, conservative, etc.
"For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong."
Yours is a good point, however, that seems to have been missed in the reporting on this study. The men's acceptance rates did also drop (significantly even) when their gender was revealed. So it appears that men might also benefit from having a gender-neutral identity.
Wait, people are still flogging politiczed misinterpretations of this study? IIRC, this study found that under the majority of circumstances women are treated better than men on GitHub; you have to hunt around for an obscure corner of it to find anything that doesn't support that. So of course that's what the media did, and it looks like you fell for it.
Also, the request was for examples of sexual harassment on HN, and I can't help but notice that you didn't provide any and instead changed the subject.
Even for an "Ask HN" question that explicitly asks if they are female? In that case, negative attention makes even less sense as it is the point of the discussion.
I don't hide, but I also don't bring it up much and my name being pretty gender neutral probably avoids a lot of frustrating moments.