Hacker News Reader

Comment by lukasm | Hacker News Reader

"The project’s team, which is almost entirely male, includes experts in finance, "

I don't understand how is that relevant. Why is press so sexiest these days? Are they trying to toehold to anything even remotely political to get the views?

View on HN

I understand that it probably isn't relevant, but I don't think it is sexist. It doesn't say that an almost entirely male team is good nor bad for the project.

For me is like they have said, a team mostly based on <random city>

Location is not usually discriminatory though, pointing out someone's gender usually is.

"A team mostly based in <xyz>" actually does add information that explores part of a story.

If the team was based in San Fransisco, it would be part of the established silicon valley culture, versus if it was based in an emerging tech hub, then the story would be that they are part of an emerging tech hub.

Very little can be written in journalism that isn't relevant in some way.

I hope so, but location is relevant e.g. Bitcoin is not a currency for IRS, so San Francisco has different implications than London.

If the team were all female, it would be the headline.

In that light, it might be better if we always mention when a team is all-male, if just for parity.

We've accepted a value system in the west that more males in a field == bad, unless that field is physically dangerous or otherwise undesirable. So the sex composition of things is noticed and considered important.

However, note that every frontier field is male-skewed, probably due to lower male risk-aversion. So this philosophy is anti-innovation.

There is some statistical evidence that males have higher variance in general. CEOs are mostly male, people in extremely advanced math classes are mostly male, but at the same time people in prison are mostly male, and people performing dirty and dangerous labor are mostly male. Since personal utility is logarithmic in success, but visibility is close to linear, it's very easy to miss the importance of this other side of the issue, but it's there and IMO not sufficiently talked about (likely because saying "X has high variance" has no bearing on whether X is high or low, and is therefore not really useful to any side trying to make a political point).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com