Hacker News Reader

Maybe all the ones you see with a public profile seem to be male. Could be that everyone they've met in person who's on HN is male. You could argue there are more subtle cultural clues in something like typically male styles of interaction (the classic HN nitpicking is easy to imagine as related to "mansplaining"). Etc.

View on HN

It could be that it really is overwhelmingly male and that the women who do participate often downplay their gender, thereby making it look even more overwhelmingly male than it actually is, thus fostering the impression that it could be 100% male. It could also be that the lack of "social" elements, like avatars, makes it inherently hard to signal such details or ferret them out if you are curious about it.

(That is not a criticism. It is an observation. I like the way profiles are handled here.)

I see no reason in that for anyone to assume an entire internet forum to be exclusively one gender. Someone sees a set of interactions that they assume to be between a single gender, so they assume everyone is that gender?

The original poster is saying "somehow in my head HN posters appear as male". That doesn't really mean the poster is assuming that HN is actually 100% male. It's a description of his or her imaginative process, which is a matter of great psychological and sociological complexity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com