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I'm not arguing with you, I just don't understand _how_ this is occurring.

Self-promotion of products? I can see that. You aren't promoting any products. Did you try that in the past?

Self-promotion of written content or a blog? Yeah a lot of the links here are from URLs I've never seen before, are people actually making money or just blowing their own horn?

I'm asking you by what mechanism people make money here, as in, actual money, not beer money. Because I can see people making 5 cents a word back through adwords, but beyond that...

>I have been here nearly fifteen years. I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

Well... Yes. The way it works is the people who established reap ideas from the technically minded, but not necessarily business minded. Once the idea bubbles up sufficiently to be recognized as a viable business opportunity for someone, it is either acted on by onramping the originator to a source of funding/offers of partnership, or just run off with. Back when interest rates were zero, a Unicorn was well worth the risk if it decided to turn into a Pegasus.

That it functions as a cadre of technically/business literate individuals is a bonus in a sense. But I tend to limit myself to trying to be a voice for sanity here; as I've found that sometimes the tendency of YC to encourage people to disregard ethical constraints sometimes requires a bucket of cold water to remedy or at least give the Feds a datapoint in the inevitable investigation that someone was told somewhere that X is not a good idea.

Plus, it's a great way to keep a finger on what the people I vote "Most likely to facilitate the creation of an unconstrained technical helltopia" are up to.

If you're looking for people with a shred of unconditional decency (if such a person exists), mayhaps look elsewhere.

> I know for a fact that participation here helps line the pockets of some of the men here.

This is so vague as to be unusable.

Firstly, I (sadly) have absolutely no doubt as to much of what you said. Offers of cash for sex, flirtations, white knighting.

> trying to establish an earned income via freelance writing and resume work and couldn't do it

HN isn't - as you know - really about soliciting work for yourself, outside a few sanctioned threads a month. There may be random people here and there who might make an ad hoc mention of it with a "reach out to me" message. But if done too much, they get sanctioned and censured. Regardless of gender.

I would not be surprised if you had said you could not earn income from HN as a freelance writer if your name was John Smith. I fail to surmise that it has anything to do with your gender.

But back to your comment, participation here lining the pockets of some of the men:

The biggest way I see for anyone to earn income here is networking. But this place is also very specifically not LinkedIn. There is an acceptance, even encouragement of it as far as it doesn't interfere with the general discourse on posted submissions.

Beyond that, job posts and similar? I can tell you that I have responded to dozens (realistically a couple of hundred) hiring and other posts in my time here. I have reached out to people with ideas, offered assistance and input. And of that, nothing has come. Not one thing.

I'm not saying your experience is wrong: I'm just not seeing evidence to support your conclusion that your gender is what is limiting things here.

I'm just not seeing evidence to support your conclusion that your gender is what is limiting things here.

Okay, give me a list of openly female members who are "doing it right" and managing to successfully use Hacker News as a networking tool the way I know for a fact some of the longtime male members have done. Show me an example I can follow.

Of course my gender is not the only factor. You can chalk some portion of it up to other factors and me failing doesn't prove it can't be done by any women.

But I'm not personally seeing other women doing it. But men certainly are.

My argument isn't that my gender is the only issue here. My argument is that as far as I can tell, I fit in here better than other women based on objective metrics like my karma count and I can't manage to break the HN "glass ceiling." So if I can't, who can?

Point me to some examples.

A quick search tells me 10.4 percent of CEOs are women and 22 percent of C-suite executives are women. As far as I can tell, in nearly fifteen years of participation, I am the only openly female member that I know of who has spent time on the leader board and I've done it twice under two different handles.

So if the goal is "first fit in" I appear to do that better than most women. And I am unable to turn it into a means to make an adequate income.

Ergo I think it is reasonable to conclude that my gender is, in fact, a factor.

I will grant you it's "unprovable." How convenient for people who don't want change and want an easy out for dismissing critiques that might lead to constructive progress.

Honestly, the only member that readily comes to mind for using HN effectively to network is patio11/Patrick Mckenzie. (And pg way, way back in the day.)

Show us the examples of male members who are doing it right, so we know what you think "doing it right" looks like.

I hired one person after meeting them through an interaction here on HN comments. She's since left to work at Google.

Women aren't represented strongly here because they aren't represented as strongly by the numbers in tech.

It's pretty obviously selection bias.

Why that is, who might be responsible, we probably should all be talking about all of that more often.

But often you're coming across as bashing the reader/commenters, over the head with your repeated anecdotes of what you've classified as failures to "network-up" the types of professional success or connections, or relationships you're seeking¹, instead of talking about how to make progress on the thing you actually want to change: women aren't anywhere near as prominently, or noticeably, on HN - or in tech! Though thankfully this is slowly changing.

Have you written anywhere about what hasn't worked over these 15 years, so that others in a similar spot may have an easier time getting what they want from this community?

I have enjoyed many of your comments over the years, have engaged with you on a variety of topics under a variety of handles - but I've gotten tired of this topic never having solutions or any related positive forces behind it.

¹ Have you defined this anywhere?

You don't have to be "in tech" to do well here. There have been lawyers and school teachers and doctors on the leader board.

I've done tons of blogging over the years trying to find some kind of constructive approach. It gets no traction.

I've mostly moved on from that. Men don't spend all their time examining their belly button in public about their social issues with work. They talk about their work.

I don't know if you want to hear this, but your bio comes off as prickly/activist and I personally wouldn't hire you because I get the impression you'd just use my company or platform as a horse to ride into battle for whatever activist cause is at the front of your mind on any given occasion.

Probably could have worded that better but, y'know

You are looking for employment and networking in a tech bro forum while carrying a 'NGO' persona and tech bros are pretty much the antithesis of NGO people. Culture clash doesn't even begin to cover it.

What's your best-case scenario these days?

Top of the leaderboard?

Recognizable blogging name?

Building yourself a niche of tech, tech adjacent work, tech leadership/marketing work?

It's not overly up to me to demonstrate evidence of the opposite to disagree with your assertion. I wouldn't know where to begin. I also don't even look at HN the same way as you (the leaderboard? I wouldn't even know about its existence if you hadn't mentioned it).

Indeed, I commiserate with some of the misogynistic or sexist behavior you describe - the sexualizing of things, and such. And I also agree that women are drastically under-represented in tech, especially the higher you get up the corporate ladder. But I'm berated by you with reference to assuming I don't want change and being dismissive of critique. Disagreeing with one aspect of an assertion doesn't not give you sufficient evidence of my motivation.

> I am the only openly female member that I know of who has spent time on the leader board and I've done it twice under two different handles.

> So if the goal is "first fit in" I appear to do that better than most women.

And if you've been on the HN leaderboard, twice, you've also done far better than vast majority of the men, too, then. Despite (or in spite) of the "boy's club" keeping you down?

> And I am unable to turn it into a means to make an adequate income.

I think the proportion of people on HN that have made it into an "adequate income source" is vanishingly small. Their visibility may make it more noticeable, but I couldn't tell you the names of more than a couple of people here who have made ANY money from HN.

There's also a problematic assertion that you are somehow ... entitled ... to make money from HN. This is separate to any gender issues, too - as I said, people who tend to think of HN as a place where having a motivation for community interaction be "what can YOU do to help put food on MY table" is quickly shut down, because it quickly becomes obnoxious, no different to the recruiters sidling up to me on LinkedIn.

I didn't assume any motive on your part, actually. But people routinely take "general observation" very personally on the internet and this is a common source of conflict that is enormously hard to resolve.

I'm not too keen to continue this discussion. I didn't start by making it about me but let me make a single comment mentioning these issues and there is a huge pile of mostly openly hostile replies and if I engage, no matter how carefully and good faith, I am assumed to be the problem.

I'm not really responsible for other people here having very big feels about some comment or other of mine. If you -- the general "you," not FireBeyond in specific -- feel very strongly about my observations, maybe wonder why that is and leave me alone about it.