As someone who has been on the receiving end of that contempt, I don't happen to agree with you. I don't believe I deserve any of the contempt I've gotten over the years and I absolutely see the contempt with which I am treated as something that actively closes doors in my face and is not a consequence of my "failure" to contribute or something.

Below is something of an explanation as to why I don't think I deserve contempt. It is not a rant, though I imagine it will be interpreted as such by some people. I'm always damned if I do and damned if I don't here.

I appear to be the only openly female member to have ever spent time on the leader board of HN (under a different handle). It's 100 names but it isn't a stable list, so there have been more than 100 people on it over the years. (Edit to add context: HN currently gets around 5 million unique visitors each month.)

If my data is accurate -- and I believe it is -- that means less than one percent of those names is an openly female member and I'm it. That puts me in a "league of my own."

For comparison purposes: I believe six percent of CEOs in the US are female and 17 percent of senior personnel (in the "C suite") are female. Yet I am routinely told it is somehow my fault I don't fit in here, my fault I am treated so badly, my fault I am poor, sexism/classism/etc are not a factor in my intractable poverty, etc. ad nauseum.

Just to be crystal clear: I am not talking trash about HN. I spend so much time here because this forum is so much better than other forums.

The problem is not HN. The problem is far larger than HN and this means you can't escape it anywhere, not even on HN which is generally a bastion of virtue in my eyes.

And before someone leaps up with the oh-so-tired accusation that I am obsessed with meaningless, worthless internet points and having a lot of karma here means nothing: It used to be pretty common on HN for men to say to other men here "You must be smart and competent because you have so much karma on HN!" That seems to have died down a good bit since I began pointing out that men do that here to other men and then do nothing but malign me any time I talk about how much karma I have to try to support some point or other I am trying to make.

In some sense, I don't care about karma points here. I use it as an easily referenced proxy for other things that are even harder to talk about in other ways.

Upvotes suggest I am deemed to be someone who "adds value" here. Yet no amount of adding value here comes back to me as significant professional respect, traction and -- critically -- income. Meanwhile, some of the men on the leader board are self-made millionaires and, in at least some cases, they got wealthy in part due to using HN to network and make professional contacts, something I very much wanted to use HN for but it has mostly been a bust for me.

I also don't care to see someone jump up and volunteer that they, also, have not managed to use HN to network or make money so "obviously" it's not my gender (or some other trait of mine). "Stuff just happens."

Yeah, I've heard it all before. It really doesn't hold water.

Not everyone uses HN that way, but some people do so successfully. It has actively been a goal of mine and I seem to make nearly zero headway on such goals.