Non-gendered handles are a standard trick for women in hacker forums or channels.

I was once publicly upbraided for revealing someone's gender -- all the regulars knew, but she wanted to be incognito for the legions of net-geeks, lest she receive zillions of come-ons every time she posted anything.

I was recently checking the stats on one of my youtube videos. 5,300+ views, and the demographics showed 100% male viewers. Admittedly, it was an OS demo, but I'm pretty sure at least a few women watched it. It's just that you'd be a fool to identify yourself as a woman on something like Youtube.

There are lots of people that identify themselves as female on YouTube and the don't all appear to be fools. Feigning womanhood in order to curry favour also works.

Read the guidelines [1]:

"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know - I think it is interesting. I would have thought that it would be easier for a woman to be successful writing on the internet. I guess I based that on 'sex sells'. It does seem that profiles on social sites with photos of pretty girls get more attention...

But sometimes you want the right kind of attention. People who look at your content, not the wrapping around it.

This article has nothing to do with the general content of hacker news. This is an article about the social status of women and how they overcome it, more political than anything else.

I would rather see articles about successful women leading innovative companies, doing innovative research, or saying intelligent things that don't hide behind "male" pen names.

I think intelligent female hackers actually get a lot of respect from fellow male hackers and this would be more on-topic if it pertained to hacker culture.

This article gives women more reason to hide behind a facade then it does to actually inspire them!

Since when is expressing genuine opinion mercilessly downvoted here?

I don't think this was about success of her blog, it was about getting writing contracts. Although she might have mixed up things a little in the story to make it a better read (like in the end, suddenly there is this mystery top blogger who recommends her blog as one of the top 10 reads - might have distorted the outcome of her names experiment a little).

I wonder if it's a well known phenomenon.

Reddit seems to have focused itself on the erosion (Or apparent) erosion of freedoms.

Hacker news seems to have focused itself on sexism (Or apparent) in technology.

Does every community gravitate to some specific cause?

The irony is that there are fewer females on HN than reddit and most other online communities. Maybe it's popular here because the female presence is notably lacking.

it's arguably a hack. Of the social engineering kind.