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2024 Self-Host User Survey Results
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this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Damn, and I thought the gender ratio on Lemmy was bad.
I do wonder how many within the man/woman responses are trans, too.
Idk if that survey was mainly advertised on lemmy, but i know that at least one instance that did a survey had maybe 2% woman respondents, but more than two thirds of those were transfem.
Either way, a little disconcerting. I'm not sure what to make of that or what (if anything) to do about it
Who cares if they are trans? The more interesting question is what would make women generally more likely to self host? More free time? Different applications? Actually having a job in IT? Being single?
You misunderstand, I only mean that it's disconcerting that there may be some reason that cis-women do not find the hobby/group appealing
Eh, the women I know in tech aren't particularly interested in self-hosting. Not sure why, but women seem to have a stronger separation between work and hobbies, whereas the men I work with often do personal projects at home related to their work. I think the women I work with would be more than capable, they just seem uninterested.
I think we are still in an age where few women were encouraged to do technical things growing up, and found those subjects later in school, university or work. I suspect that will change over the next ten years.
That's also a huge part of it. Statistically, the women you see in technical positions probably picked it in college instead of being a hobby as a kid, so they see it more as a career than a hobby. Hopefully that's the case, because I'd love to see more women get into it.
The industry needs some diversity. Before it was all white men and now you can break down 80% of the industry into a few groups.
Agreed. It has gotten a lot better since I've been in the industry, but it still has a long way to go.
I also see some serious discrimination against women who don't fall into the narrow stereotype. They better wear makeup and be all proper or else they are rejected. It is especially bad if you are on the spectrum. When people see an weird guy they think nerd and it is normal. However that is very much not the case for women. It is taboo for a woman not to be good with people.
Possibly related to the whole mental load thing: https://english.emmaclit.com/2017/05/20/you-shouldve-asked/
When you have two jobs you don't really want a third.
Yeah, I totally get that.
However, the women in my workplace either aren't married or have no kids. They just don't want to do "work stuff" outside of work hours, so I don't think that comic really applies.
Personal experience w/ SO about similar realization
Over the past year or two, my wife has gotten really stressed by the kids, so I (male) have taken over a lot of the tasks involving the kids. I make breakfast and lunch and drop the kids at school every day, then more often than not make dinner when I finish work, and I put the kids to bed every night. My wife is a SAHM, but she's had a ton of issues with anxiety recently, so she's mostly been caring for the youngest (4yo) and picking up the others from school. All the kids are quite independent now and mostly play with the neighbors, and she makes dinner 1-2x/week. I do almost all of the shopping, laundry, dishes, etc, but she still stresses about those despite not doing much of it (again, anxiety).We have a very different way of working on household tasks. When I'm short on time, I do the urgent things first and intentionally ignore the less important details to be handled later (usually the weekend). When she is short on time, she'll stay up late and do all the details while also doing the important things, then she's burnt out for the next few days (understandable) and things degrade back to where they were. I think the average level of tidiness and amount of work is similar between our approaches.
So she has essentially retained the mental load, even though I've taken the lion's share of the actual work. Just seeing a mess stresses her out, whereas for me, a mess is just an obstacle that I can work around in the short-term. It's not that I don't see the mess, just that I'm a lot more focused on the task than the broader picture.
My thought is that this is a bunch of latent guilt stemming from her upbringing. She grew up in an E. Asian household, with all of the social expectations and whatnot, so when she sees a mess, she takes it as a personal attack on not being a good enough home maker. I had a similar upbringing, where my mom stayed home w/ us kids and my dad was the sole breadwinner. However, when I was a teenager, my mom started to work outside the house and my dad was able to WFH more, so they shared the household responsibilities a bit more (she still did laundry and shopping, but my dad did more cooking and dishes). My in-laws have had a similar transition (MIL works, FIL takes SS and doesn't work), but my MIL still keeps the same responsibilities she always had.
So, I've been trying to have things a bit more complete, even if in just one area, rather than spreading efforts around the house, and it seems to have a much bigger impact on her anxiety than what I would normally do. I've also listed all of the household chores, and we'll be assigning explicit responsibility of tasks to the kids (they had them as chores, but there was no formal handover of responsibility), as well as offering the kids incentives to take on additional tasks (in our case, that means spending money). My goal is to reduce her mental load and enable her to think about things outside of the home to hopefully get over the anxiety issues she's been facing.
To me, this totally confirms the gist of that post. Taking away the work of a task still leaves the mental load of that task.
That said, I think there's something more here though. I think men see work as a end in itself, whereas women see it as a means to an end (i.e. men want to hunt despite it being less efficient, because the trophy is the point). I'm sure there's a ton of variability there, but I wonder if there's more than just culture at play here (i.e. the above mentality also makes sense in a hunter/gatherer context; men do the big, showy things, while women do the consistent work of the tribe). I don't know, what I do know is that none of the women I know have hobbies that are similar to the work they do, even if they find their work to be fulfilling.
Yeah, this is me. I refuse to get into work related hobbies, I just don't want to get burned out
Wonder how the survey was sent out and whether that affected sampling.
Regardless, with -3-4k responses, that’s disappointing, if not concerning.
I only have a more personal sense for Lemmy. Do you have a source for Lemmy gender diversity?
Anyway, what do you think are the underlying issues? And what would be some suggestions to the community to address them?
It's hard to know overall for Lemmy, but I know that both Lemmy.ca and Lemmy.nz have surveyed their members.
https://lemmy.ca/post/15125231 https://lemmy.nz/post/12001861
Both were around 87% men, where as this selfhosting one is like 96% men.
I would guess it's explained by society. Women are less likely to be in STEM which seems to almost be a prerequisite for Lemmy and possibly self-hosting, and of those women in STEM, and ( despite what you might think about your own house) there is still a societal expectation of them running the household and doing most of the household chores, even when they work full time. A third job, selfhosting, may be too much.
I also think it depends on where you are. It is way more acceptable in the West to have equal roles.
The survey was originally sent out on reddit /r/selfhosted, so I expect most respondents are from there.