Women, Male Geeks, And Reddit

Inspired by a recent conversation on Reddit, Esther Zuckerman examines the culture of the massive social site with regards to women:

Redditors are manly guys. According to Google's Doubleclick Ad Planner the site's U.S. users are 66 percent male, and its skew towards dudes has been discussed outside the site. The blog Geek Feminism took on the subject in 2009. In December, Daily Dot wrote that asking whether Reddit is sexist "hardly seems worth an argument" because the answer is so obvious: "it is." Jezebel headlined a story in April as "Reddit Is Officially the Worst Possible Place for Rape Victims to Seek Advice."

True to form, Reddit has launched another thread in response to Zuckerman's piece, where a user relates the issue to a prevalence of sexism in geek and tech culture:

Guys on Reddit are very typically coming from STEM fields – a lot of engineers, a lot of programmers. I really think the complete lack of basic understanding of social justice on Reddit, the lack of understanding of how past oppression continues to exert force on the present, is reflective of a larger failure of a good humanities education. It's reflective of the increasing early specialization we require of college and even high school kids. Their STEM curriculums don't require much of a humanities or social science foundation, so they grow up completely unarmed with the tools required to think critically about society, and totally unaware of how social structures shape everyone's lives – and it's especially invisible to them as mostly white, middle-class, straight males.