
Only One Woman in Top 100 Stack Overflow Accounts - lindsey-kirch
https://hackernoon.com/only-1-woman-in-top-100-stack-overflow-accounts-1c9ded763684#.ug803llzg
======
froogle
The title is somewhat misleading, I think.

> In total, the visual recognition API classified 1,428 profiles as masculine,
> 84 as feminine and 1,964 as unclassified.

> The top 100 Stack Overflow users consist of 77 masculine profiles, 21
> unclassified and 1 feminine profile.

They only identified a single account belonging to a female, but there 21
unclassified accounts in the top 100 that could also belong to females.

I would certainly expect women to be more reluctant than men to note their
gender on their online profiles.

------
TkTech
It seems odd to have used avatars as the sole metric. I know many male
individuals that use female avatars and the vast majority of both males and
females I know do not use any representative avatar.

Is there a particular reason you chose to use the avatar instead of gender
weighting based off of the posts and questions, which tend to provide more
accurate results? While we noted when we tried this that most technical
discussion on stack overflow leaned towards masculine even when written by a
female, it should still be far more accurate than the avatars.

------
doc_gunthrop
How does one have the gall to make this kind of claim with such a flawed
methodology?

> Out of the top 3,479 profiles, the visual recognition API classified 1,515
> profile images with a discernible gender.

3,479 seems to be an arbitrary number and no explanation is given as to why
that was number was chosen. But, more importantly, more than half of these top
users, who could be of either gender, were eliminated from the results, which
already makes this study inconclusive.

The second major flaw is that the author determined a user's gender by their
profile image, using a "masculine" or "feminine" classification. If already
less than half of user profile images had a discernible gender, who's to say
that, of those images that did have a discernible gender, the profile image
accurately represents the user's gender? What if I decided to set a
celebrity's image as my profile image? If my profile had Melissa Joan Hart as
the image, does that make me female? If my profile image was of Bryan
Cranston, does that make me male?

Also, how is "feminine" and "masculine" determined by this API? Does having
long hair qualify as a feminine trait? John Romero has long, flowing hair and
painted fingernails; does that make him female? Conversely, if a female has
short hair does that means she's categorized as part of the "masculine" group?

The title to the article is absolutely misleading and wildly inaccurate. Even
after the author admits:

> Determining gender on Stack Overflow turned out to be trickier than we
> initially anticipated.

She still has the nerve to make the claim that there is only one woman in the
top 100 SO accounts in the title and throughout the article.

------
norikki
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5LRdW8xw70)

