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Proportionally, do Trans women have greater visibility in the Open Source ecosystem as compared to Cis Women?
This is anecdotal, but I've often noticed that, I read a technical blog post by someone, end up following them, find that they are women (pronouns/name) and later find that they are trans.
At this point almost all women whose technical blogs I follow are Trans. So, this makes me wonder, are Cis women Software Engineers just not interested in Open Source or writing blogs? If there is some sort of discrimination involved then it should also effect Trans women since they are just another username on the screen, just like everyone else. In fact they may even face more discrimination than Cis women.
This very much looks like something progressives should be up in the arms about since Identarian politics and equality of outcome is very much their thing. But you only have strategic silence.
I think this is potentially evidence against the blank slatism that says systemic discrimination is the only possible reason for the lack of female representation in certain occupations. One issue you could poke in this argument is that Trans women were socialized as male, but I think all the young boys who are being socialized as girls today will soon prove them wrong.
I don't think my CS domain interests are too niche. They mostly lean towards Systems, Security, Programming languages (Go, Rust, C++, ...). I source technical content on these topics from HN, lobste.rs and some subreddits which themselves are not overly niche platforms in the Software industry. So I think there is something to think about here.
OR I am just falling prey to some sort of Sampling bias and the argument above is garbage.
Having said all this, I actually think a 50/50 gender distribution typically helps in creating a healthier work atmosphere, mitigating the worst excesses of either gender. Male dominated work environments can run you ragged and be outright abusive when under a lot of competition.
<rant>But, I do not see any way to achieve this due to the asymmetry in the distribution of interest. When taken to its logical conclusion, average expendable (male) Software Engineers like me will be left hanging out to dry unlike average or below average women. And it galls me when my concerns get gaslighted as incompetent men who cannot handle the competition.
</rant>Not surprising to me, given the coincidence of autism spectrum disorders with (at least) MtF transgenderism. This makes it easier to deep-dive on things worth blogging about, and possibly makes blogging easier also. After you consider the terminally-online environment, the fact that there seems to be at least some kind of memetic propagation of trans identities (e.g., "cracking someone's egg"), the high base M:F ratio in tech, and the long history of visible transpeople in tech compared to other fields, it seems pretty likely to me that there will be enough men transitioning to easily outnumber the women in this sphere.
I'm completely unsurprised, because progressives generally believe TWAW. In addition, a male transitioning is a two-point swing towards the goal (currently stated at 50:50, but I expect those goalposts to move); a woman joining and becoming publicly visible in the same way is only a one-point swing.
IMHO, the fact that they're CS interests at all makes them niche. You might have "mainstream" interests within the niche, but that just means they're not niche² interests. Consider the stereotype of a C++ programmer vs. a web designer. Pretty much all technical women I know ended up favoring webbish stuff, because it's an environment where you can make cool-looking stuff happen right away and evolve it interactively.
This seems like a correct inference, assuming you're a disfavored individual in a space with heavy affirmative action.
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