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I have no understanding of that field so I’ll take your word for it. But if you look at open source contributions on GitHub as recently as 2021, which is far from theoretical computer science but is at least something technical and important, women make ~5% of contributions. This study looked at names, and there are many transgender programmers active on GitHub, and they seem to love Linux… so the number of real female contributors may be as low as 1-3%. This is a good metric because it’s technical work for the pure love of technical work.
I dispute that it's such a good metric, because GitHub submissions always have an element of flexing and self-actualisation (the "become the best stamp collector in Sheffield" type of male hierarchy climbing pursuit). The best female programmers I know disproportionately do not put their hobby projects on Github, and are often unenthused by the idea even if urged to (it draws attention, might attract the bad kind of attention, looks like cringy showing off which they just axiomatically don't like, etc.).
Hell, even in my personal space, my SO has probably written 5x the volume of shell scripts to automate random chores that I have (my tolerance for annoyances being much higher), but mine are on github with a nice readme and Show HN post to introduce them and hers are not.
More anecdata, but some of the most mathematically interesting code in one of my favorite open source projects had its first version written by a female programmer, who doesn't have a single commit, because her conditions for being persuaded into contributing were basically "you own the translated code, you don't put my name on it, you don't ask me for support, you don't suggest others ask me for support".
She got like 5 papers and a dissertation for her PhD (which she finished at least 25% faster than I did) out of the research that led to that code, during a period when I was spending a ton of time helping new users of the rest of the software for no immediate personal benefit, so it's hard to say that she was doing the wrong thing, at least in the short run. On the other hand, today those papers have ~140 citations between them, none since 2022; the one paper about the project she was a silent contributor to is over a thousand now, and that's because most users' papers cite a downstream project instead.
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What do you think is driving useful research if not just that?
Someone just going with the flow isn't going to email their prof with "I've been trying to solve this open research problem but got stuck two thirds of the way, do you maybe have some pointers..." followed with publishing several papers before even considering PhD studies (like I did way back in the day).
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Right, but the former is good! Computing runs on this kind of person. It’s very important if female programmes don’t like to draw attention or be the best at something, and especially if they become the majority of a profession and start discouraging it in men. That’s a big part of Andrews’ point.
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Huh. Sounds like the rise of LLMs should disproportionally benefit women. It turns coding from grind into review/discussion and it strongly benefits local development.
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