Hacker News Reader

Comment by anqh4 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there was one of these correlating gender (actual gender) of the author of the question and language.

We've banned this account for trolling. Would you please stop creating accounts to break HN's guidelines with?

Third chart on https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/01/19/women-in-the-2016-stac..., but it's not too interesting.

The differences are very small, and I am not too surprised with the relative popularity of Matlab and R compared to say Haskell, since there are relatively more women majoring in engineering that computer science, as well as relatively high numbers doing quantitative work in the social sciences. I wonder why Rust, though, is such a huge outlier. Maybe it is just noisy because there are so few people asking about Rust at all on Stack Overflow.

From the link, the women surveyed skewed towards being more junior/less experienced. And Rust is not exactly a language that skews towards junior developers, due to its high learning curve. I bet Rust would be less of an outlier if one controlled for level of experience.

Luckily, there is (still?) enough privacy on the net that you can't generally determine such private pieces of information unless the user provides it themselves.

are you anticipating that female engineers use different languages than male engineers?

Yes

why is that? and what sort of differences in choice do you anticipate?

For some reason, in my local tech community, the female/male ratio is higher among Android devs than iOS devs.

I don't know why that is, but it's something that I noticed. I'd be curious if that is a general trend or just a coincidence.

What do you mean by "actual gender"?

Gender at birth

Yikes.

Given the very low incidence of transsexualism in the general population and the fact that we're talking about mental work, using people's self-reported gender will either not hurt, or might even help.

Additionally, since gender refers to behaviour and societal roles, I don't think "gender at birth" makes sense, given that all babies act pretty much the same for the first few months. You would be better to phrase your question as "gene-determined sex", which is for now unchangeable.

> given that all babies act pretty much the same for the first few months.

that's not actually true - http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2016/july/infants-prefer-toys-typ...

there's a lot of evidence to suggest that choice of toy is at least partially influenced by sex.

There is a low incidence of transsexualism in the general population, but we are talking about the tech scene. And particularly among programmers, it seems to me that a lot of female programmers have a Y chromosome. Considering that there aren't that many female programmers to begin with, I wouldn't be too sure that effect is negligible.

> it seems to me that a lot of female programmers have a Y chromosome.

I do not believe you

Well, it's just my personal impression. I'm not saying it's a majority, but there are a lot of trans people in the tech community. So if you want to make statistics, I think you should take that into account, and not pretend that they don't matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com