I will note that some of the work I've done under nyms has hit the front page here and it was disheartening to see across hundreds of comments how many people just assumed whoever was behind the project was a guy. It was rare for anyone to be gender neutral and that was as radical as it got. No one assumed the author of that project was a woman.
Oh well.
I don't hide, but I also don't bring it up much and my name being pretty gender neutral probably avoids a lot of frustrating moments.
"After sifting through near to three million pull requests submitted on GitHub, they found – against their expectations – that code written by women was approved at a slightly higher rate than that composed by men, 78.6 percent to 74.6 percent, respectively. That’s roughly an extra 120,000 pieces of code.
"Nevertheless, there was a depressing caveat: this rule only applied if their gender was unidentified. If female coders’ gender was known, their overall pull request acceptance rate fell from 78.6 percent to 62.5 percent. This appears to suggest that women may in fact be better coders, but are automatically discriminated against simply because of their gender."
Apart from that, there are endless examples of women being harassed, stalked, assaulted, and even killed because of their gender. Is it any wonder that many might prefer not to reveal their gender and enjoy the benefits of relative equality when they have the ability to do so, such as in an online forum like HN?
Really, you'd have to be living in a cave not to be aware of the existence of sexual harassment. Just on HN, articles about it float to the front page at least one or twice a month, which is why I really have to wonder if you are just trolling by asking that question.
[1] - http://www.iflscience.com/technology/women-are-seen-better-c...
Note: I do not mean someone should set up a page long google form that asks for age and gender. I mean someone who has at least a small amount of experience with census' should set up a detailed and lengthy census which asks questions with nuance. I don't think I have the capability to do this, or I would.
I also post links sometimes, not often.
For Russians - m Russian - it's clear from my name that I'm a girl. not sure about non Russians.
