Comment by DoreenMichele

I originally joined in July 2009. HN was a lot smaller back then and demographic polls were somewhat common at first, at least comparatively. They later became less common.

There was variation in poll results, but my recollection is the variation was something like 96 to 99 percent male. At some point, I settled on a figure of "roughly 98 percent" as a good faith estimate.

I have a Certificate in GIS and a relatively strong math background for the general population, though not for HN, and I know a little CSS and HTML, but I'm not really a programmer, I'm not perceived of as "a tech person" by the HN crowd, etc. I feel I "belong"/fit but it's pretty clear to me most people feel I don't.

When I hit something like 2000 karma under my old handle -- and probably the top 3 people on the leaderboard all had about 50k at the time -- I began getting weird comments that suggested to me I was viewed as "prominent for a woman" on HN, though the bottom of the leaderboard was probably around 10k at the time.

I'm a big fat nobody in the real world and was nowhere near qualifying as having "a lot" of karma for HN and yet comments seemed to suggest people found me noteworthy. So I spent some time keeping private data to try to sort out what the heck was going on.

Those records are long lost and I'm disinclined to say too much about them publicly, but I mention them to say I did track data of some sort related to gender and HN membership for a time.

Things have changed over time and commenting as openly female is less drama for me than it used to be. There are many, many confounding factors that make it impossible to determine how much that is cultural change related to gender and how much that's somehow "me"/my relationship to the site, but I've observed that I notice openly female participants more often and topics seem to include more articles by and/or about women in a way that seems like inclusion is more normalized than it was 14 years ago. Or even 10 years ago.

The data here generally fits with my personal observations and impressions that HN is more diverse than it used to be. I don't feel it matters a whole lot if it's off by a bit. It makes little difference to me whether the "non male" demographics is double, triple, quintuple or septuple the roughly 2 percent it once was. I feel and see the difference and presumably others do too that they show up more, percentage-wise.

I commented because I'm probably the only person who has a history of tracking gender-related data on HN and I know how this goes: People see the low figures and start having fits about sexism.

I'm just trying to provide context. Yes, HN skews very strongly male. It used to skew even more strongly male according to my personal observations and polls of this sort.

FWIW.