
Ask HN: What percentage of HN regulars are Women? - RoadieRoller
Google search of &quot;Hacker&quot; mostly brings men or their stereotypes and most people stay away because of the negativity around the term. So, I would like to know how many women techies really understood that &quot;Hacker News&quot; has nothing to do with hacking and are regulars to HN.
======
DoreenMichele
This is old and things have changed substantially since I wrote it, but it is
the only repository of raw data on the topic that I know of:

[http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-
dat...](http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2015/01/some-raw-data-on-
prominence-of-women-on.html)

In the last year or so, I have noticed a big uptick in old handles that were
inactive for a long time now participating and self identifying as female. I
have long seen evidence that a lot of women here actively downplay or hide
their gender. Historical surveys have suggested that 2 to 3 percent of the
membership was female, but I believe that figure to be low because of self
reported behavior of women hiding their gender. But women appear to be coming
out of the woodwork these days.

I hit the leaderboard in October under a different handle. I appear to be the
first openly female member of the leaderboard.

I feel there has been a lot of positive change in the last few years.

------
yorwba
How do you expect anyone to determine this? Not everyone conveniently mentions
their gender in their profile.

~~~
RoadieRoller
True, no denying that. I wasn't thinking of snooping into their profile
details. I was mostly thinking about - women quoting HN during technical
discussions inside their company, present their startups to YC and stuffs like
that.

