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Last week we told you about the Reddit's internal discussion about its not-so-welcoming attitude towards women who use the site. We called up Reddit general manager Erik Martin to find out what — if anything — can be done about the hostility many said they encountered. Martin said he knows about the site's gender problems. And as we noted in our previous post, this isn't anything new. "It’s something we’ve thought about and read a lot of commentary about for a long time," he told us. Part of the problem, he said, goes back to the beginnings of Reddit as a community for coders "which are also disproportionately male, and that’s a whole ‘nother issue which is something we’d like to see change in the world, too. That’s probably the biggest one thing and it kind of became in its own sense a self perpetuating thing after that."

So, how to fix it? Besides altering the skewed gender demographics, Martin explained making women more comfortable on Reddit will come through helping people find communities, or Subreddits, within the site that are not being trolled by misogynists. "Reddit is sort of a community of communities and there are certainly communities where you don’t see those cultural trends and there are ones where you absolutely do," Martin said. "As we do a better job of helping people find what they are looking for on Reddit and the communities they are looking for on Reddit and also help people do a better job of cultivating and creating the communities that they want I think there will be even more choices to participate and feel comfortable when they are there no matter what their interests are."