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0 pointsDoreenMichele7y ago0 comments

From my personal experience and what I can guess about hackers I've talked to for instance on IRC, that's how most guys learned it : the web is full of resources for whoever wants to learn.

I would love to learn to code. It's the reason I originally joined HN closing in on a decade ago. (Proof: my first post, the day I joined: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=713015)

But I have found that one barrier to me getting anywhere is a lack of ability to ask questions and get meaningful answers. Men often have male friends that they can shoot the breeze with and casually mention some coding thing and get some kind of reply from one or more people.

And my experience is that men don't talk to me that way. I don't have any buddies I can shoot the breeze with who will go "Oh, yeah, that thing is a known issue and you need to do yadda." Men shooting the breeze with me are inevitably hitting on me, even if they are married.

I've been here a long time. People here mostly don't hit me up via private email and things like that to just chat about a thing. When I have explicitly said "You can email me to discuss that further." I never get emails to discuss that further. Instead, I get inquiries into when I next plan to vacation in their part of the world and suggestions that I would enjoy visiting their lovely country (and, hint, hint, they would love to have coffee with me should I happen to casually drop by their country on vacay, because that's clearly how desperately poor women who can't pay their damn bills spend their time, globe trotting to hook up with random internet strangers who apparently thought "Wow, a woman speaking to me. She must be looking for sex!").

I've occasionally had brief stints of being able to have casual conversations in a chat environment with a guy who happened to be an IT guy. I found it enormously, incredibly, mind-blowingly useful and valuable to get those casual comments of "Oh, are you doing X? Cuz, you know, X don't work. Did you think of yadda?" But most of the time, I simply don't have access to that kind of conversation.

Nearly a decade of hanging on HN has failed to magically give me such access. Anytime I comment on how frustrated I am about such things, I am inevitably pissed all over by people acting like I am making shit up -- because, yes, clearly, this is how you welcome women into the bro coders club, by pissing on them at every available opportunity.

I still would like to learn to code. I spend a lot of time online. I think men vastly underestimate how much support they have access to. A small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours and hours of time by pointing you in the right direction. As a woman, I mostly can't get access to those types of comments. Men are too busy trying to figure out how to ask for my phone number.

I really don't know how to adequately describe the ginormous Wall of China style deafening silence that faces me and that helps keep me poor, unable to figure out coding and a zillion other things that drive me crazy.

To be clear, I'm not posting this to just whine about my pathetic life. That's inevitably the interpretation most people make of such comments by me. It's frankly just another means to shut me out, dismiss me and invalidate my points.

I'm posting it to try to elucidate the fact that guys have more access to support than they seem to appreciate. I can't join a chat or slack channel and count on getting help because I posted a question. I can count on being dismissed, sexually harassed and treated like an unwelcome intruder.

And that's a giant barrier that men mostly don't seem to face. Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me. If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.

Edit:

There are multiple people replying here to

A. Tell me "It's simple! Just don't tell people you are a girl!"

B. Generally be dismissive, as if I don't have a real problem and otherwise act like I don't have a point.

To people here actually interested in solving the problem space here: Please note how shitty it is for all the replies to me to be dismissive, not listen, etc. Please note how such replies are part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I'm not planning to engage such replies. They are not useful and they tend to not even be made in good faith.

The short version of why I don't hide my gender online: I am trying to make business connections. I cannot hide my gender in person.

If I have to hide my gender to try to connect and then I arrange an in person meet-up and they are shocked and appalled to learn I'm actually a woman and I never told them that, this is not going to go good places for my career by any stretch of the imagination. They will feel lied to, betrayed and like I'm not trustworthy. No, they won't want to work with me if I can't so much as admit to the simple fact of my gender.

I also cannot even get paid if I do work online and need to hide my full name so as to hide my gender. You can only hide your gender successfully if you are basically posting anonymously and not trying to make real world, meaningful connections.

Geez. How is that not blindingly obvious on the face of it?

0 comments

Const-me7y ago

I'm a guy and no, I don't have more access to support. And I never had. I've self learned programming with very little help, mostly books and internet. Then at 18 I've found my first job as a programmer.

> small comment here and there by someone knowledgeable can save you hours and hours

Sometimes it can. But if you're just a beginner, you don't need the expert advice you're talking about. Hours and hours of what? If you're already programming even at very entry level, you can get very similar advice on stackoverflow.

> If it were, I think I would already be a coder with several published projects.

I don't think you lack expert advice. I think you lack interest.

I remember since pre-teen, I was obsessed about computers, first videogames, then computers in general. I've spent hundreds of hours tinkering with them, trying to make them do what I wanted them to. I wasn't motivated by money, it was fun.

Vast majority of exceptionally good programmers I know can tell similar stories about themselves. There're a few women among them, too.

When you have interest that strong, you spend hundreds of hours of your time, unpaid, doing what you like. Especially when you're a teen with no kids. That's what helps with learning programming. Also reading good books. Expert advice only becomes relevant much later, and by that time, if you pick jobs well, you'll be surrounded with smart people willing to answer your questions.

If you don't have that kind of interest in computers, you won't become exceptionally good. You probably can still learn the trade and make a living off it, but will require substantial time and efforts. I think that's the target audience of that summer school.

jki2757y ago

I have the conversations you say do not happen with female developers and engineers every single day, online and offline. I've mentored and developed male and female engineers and technicians for decades, without any discrimination, harassment, or asking for their phone numbers.

I don't care one whit about what gender an engineer or technician is, nor do I even know all the time online -- sometimes I find out years later, sometimes I never find out, but I've never cared.

If you want to learn to code, join one of the free Udacity courses, or MIT or Harvard's free EdX courses, and learn, and write your projects. Nobody's going to stop you. Information is free. And you got a whole stack of useful responses to the post you just linked.

grondilu7y ago

> Men can talk to other men casually and get loads of useful information that is simply not accessible to me.

That is just hard to understand. If your gender is an issue, why even make it public in the first place? I mean, ever heard of the saying "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_...

the_af7y ago

Her username here is Doreen, and I assume that's her name. Why should she have to hide it?

If she has to hide her sex in order to get meaningful answers, that right there is a huge impediment us men in tech never have to experience.

1 more reply

joenot4437y ago

At the risk of simplifying your problem, what's stopping you from just not announcing your gender at all on these forums or chatrooms? Why make your username your full name at all? I've been joenot443 for as long as I can remember, and when given the option, I never volunteer my gender because I just don't think it's usually useful for that discussion.

80mph7y ago

What are your thoughts on this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16465762

Posted by a user with a female name & received substantial feedback.

DoreenMicheleOP7y ago

Your question is a "gotcha" question. It's dismissive and acts like the occasional exception proves the problem doesn't exist. It's also unrelated to the things I'm complaining about.

But here are a few observations about that post:

The HN account in question has under 300 karma. There are three posts, all about the book this person is writing. All comments by the account are in replies to those posts. The account has made zero effort to participate generally in discussion here.

She's not trying to network. She's developing a single project and getting public feedback.

Here are a few other observations for you:

Between my original handle and this one, I have more than 40K karma. My previous handle was briefly on the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard.

I've just looked. I think I can confidently determine the full names of twelve of the top fifteen members of the HN leaderboard quite readily, with minimal effort. Many of them use their name or some portion of it as their handle or some portion of it. (First name, last initial; first initial, last name; etc.)

Yet I am routinely told that I should hide my gender online to avoid problems.

Here is a post I made in January that I wrote and self-posted. It got substantial karma and substantial comments and 60K+ page views total (about 55k the first couple of days):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18842009

It got one and exactly one private email from someone potentially professionally meaningful to me. I replied to that email. They did not reply to my reply. So I don't know how useful that is for networking purposes.

It made zero money, though it had a Patreon link and a PayPal link at the time. I spent about two weeks developing that piece.

People on HN use adblockers more aggressively than normal and ads generally are doing pretty poorly these days. All of HN expects quality writing on the front page, all day, every day. They decry pay walls and will post workarounds for pay walls.

Regular journalism sites are struggling and dying. They can't figure out how to pay their bills.

HN generally trends towards well-heeled male programmers, lawyers and other respected professionals. Yet they don't want to support writers. I am routinely told "get a real job" by people here.

There is no method by which the HN audience is willing to pay for content. Not by patronage, not by subscriptions, not by tip jars and certainly not by ads. The expectation that people post good content and make it freely available to the general public kind of worked when you could make money via ads. But ad payments have dropped across the board by 75 percent or more online for most sites that I know of.

I mean, I could just go on and on, but it's pointless because you aren't here to understand the problem space. You are here to post a single link as a "gotcha" that proves in your mind that there is no sexism on HN.

If there is no sexism on HN, why do I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of 100 names?

(Please note that a lot more than 100 people have spent time on it. As far as I can tell, that means that not even 1 percent of the members who have spent time there post as openly female. Please note the qualifier there of openly female. I am aware that it is possible that someone has made the leaderboard while hiding the fact that they are female.)

Anyway, this argument is incredibly tiresome and I think I need to try to go do other things. More people piling on to try to somehow dismiss me is not some kind of good faith engagement by any stretch of the imagination.

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