Even being a medical doctor means having a very good life, I wouldn't go for it in a million years.

I have a blog and a youtube channel that talks about raspberry pi, open source, embedded, and other programming projects that I do for fun in my spare time. I checked the youtube stats yesterday and my female audience was 0% (not rounded down, it was 0.0% according to Youtube) among about 10K people who watched them last week - globally. When I had google analytics on my site, it reported the same thing. Because my channel is new and no one knows whether I am a sexist person or not, so we can safely filter out the reputation problem. Also, I have a foreign name so people can't guess my gender by looking at my name. I think that anyone who watches my video has to be curious about what I do, not because they are used to me talking in a certain way.

Now my channel is a small sample, but I have a feeling that not many girls find tech (or at least what I do) fun and appealing the current way it is while many boys do. So it's just about an opportunity, money and job and whatnot as it is a hobby, a thing to have fun with that attracts certain demographic to a profession.

Well... how do you think Google Analytics guesses whether or not a person is male or female? It uses a machine learning algorithm based on browsing habits, and "views Youtube videos about technology/open source/Raspberry Pi" is a feature that is strongly weighted towards maleness.

I'm a woman in tech. Google used to have a page somewhere where it told you what it assumed about you from your habits. It was 100% confident that I was male until I started searching for pregnancy stuff all the time.

Also a woman in tech. A while back I checked my profile. It thought I we was a man.

Sure, but in many cases it didn't have to guess. It knows. Moreover, even when it had to guess, the guess can sway both ways based on a person's watch history too: Wouldn't you think a person who watches a raspberry pi video after they watched 10 videos about handbags and jewelry and mascara can be guessed as a female? After all, Google IDs unique people and devices.

There are millions of women out there that don’t watch videos of handbags and jewelry and mascara, as there are millions of men who don’t watch sports or cars or whatever.

I'm currently running a forum where people has to select it's gender. I'd say, by the samples I've done, that most of the people don't lie.

And the stats are not surprising, I have about half females, and they participate way more in "girly" things.

The same happened in another forum I had.

Do you know that's how it works, or is it a guess? That's not really the standard way to do audience segmentation.

Valid point. Although tons of people have both GMAil and Youtube accounts and Google forced you to connect them a few years ago when they were pushing Google+, so they should have actual personal information on many people these days.

If you're logged into your Google account when you watch a Youtube video, I'm guessing they don't have that much uncertainty in their assumption of your gender.

You are presuming that those stats are accurate though.

I wouldn’t be surprised if some women were miscategorised by whatever algorithmarked their gender.

Of course they are. This is practically in the definition of stats. It isn’t a question of if it’s inaccurate, but of how inaccurate it is. A confidence of 95% isn’t much worse than 100% for purposes of advertising.

> The article makes exactly that point:

For everyone's reference, for some reason dang migrated this comment thread wholesale from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16510442