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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>The truth is that females just don't care about computer programming at all. Yes, there are some female engineers at woke companies like Facebook and Google, but none of them do software development in their free time: working as a software engineer is just an easy way to make a lot of money to them (which is easy for them because the hiring policy greatly benefits them, and they are practically immune from being fired). Consequently, all open source software is developed by males, and anyone presenting as a woman is actually a trans-identifying male, especially the people who are into a super-niche field that women wouldn't give a fuck about because it won't help them get a job, like developing game console emulators and stuff like that.
It's not about discrimination either. It costs you nothing to create a github account, or to sign up for a competitive programming contest. But females will absolutely refuse to do any of that stuff. So yes: all the CS-related blogs are written by males. I'm not even being facetious: there is not a single worthwhile CS blog written by a biological female. If the above comments sound sexist to you, please prove me wrong by citing counter-examples.
This is overstating the case even though it is directionally correct. I can’t disprove your claims about the blogs, mostly because trying to Google anything about women in tech is a shitshow, so I’ll grant that. But there are obviously women with GitHub accounts, and I’d be willing to bet money that female Google engineers have actual open-source contributions.
The field is heavily skewed, not absolutely skewed.
Yes, I exaggerated for dramatic effect, but I think the field is more heavily skewed than you imagine.
It's true that tech firms like Google sometimes hire women to work on open-source projects like Chromium, so technically there are female open-source contributors. But since these women don't haven an intrinsic interest in the field they're not really going to push the boundaries, which really is necessary for other people to follow your work.
It's like going to a tech convention where someone hired a bunch of booth babes to improve the gender ratio, but at the end of the day, the most interesting conversations happen in the hotel lobby, after the women have gone home, because nobody paid them to stay and they have better things to do with their evening than talk to a bunch of nerds about a topic that's boring to them.
Open source software development is still based very much around passion. Linus Torvalds famously announced Linux with “I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)”. Terry A. Davis developed TempleOS because God commanded him to; it's an extremely impressive project that, unlike Linux, is used by nobody. It seems like only males take on projects like this: things nobody asked for and that do not come with the promise of a reward. Is there literally a single female person on the planet who would consider creating an operation system from scratch just as a hobby?
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This is overstating the case but largely true. But it answers the wrong question. The interesting question is not "why are so many women in prominent programming positions trans" -- the most likely answer to that is that transwomen are men and therefore can expected to have male interests. The interesting question is "Why are so many XY-chromosome people in prominent programming positions trans".
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This is basically the whole explanation. I'd add that if you are male and have a bit of a hystrionic personality going trans will give you a big visibility boost both in getting your blog promoted and in getting talking spots in the conference circle where the demand for women has vastly outpaced supply. There's a couple of transwomen who regularly get on the front page of lobste.rs despite plastering their website with furry fetish art, no other demographic could ever get away with that (and people who took objection to that were banned).
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https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/girls-and-software
https://binaryredneck.net/blog/migrated/gifts-all-kinds/
Susan Sons seems legit.
Also https://rachelbythebay.com/ (literally thousands of sysadmin/programming posts by a grumpy but competent author, written over the course of decades).
There are definitely not zero high quality CS blogs written by female authors.
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Avoiding politics is pretty based.
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Is this a matter of interest in things vs. interest in people?
Anecdotally, I have dated several women in tech, and all of them were in UX development. Obviously, that's not completely representative, but my impression is that women in tech are either interested in people or using coding as a means to an end (like a good income) whereas my male friends in tech are much more thing-orientated and interested in e.g. coding as a puzzle game (as well as setting me up with hot/smart women in tech, for which I'm grateful!).
If so, I expect modern ML to increase women in tech.
Even though the models aren't quite like talking to people, they vastly boost the skill overlap and vibe overlap between social skills and programming.
That's plausible.
I also wonder whether women are more likely to treat e.g. ChatGPT as a person, or even start to think of it like a person. Chatbots seem to be one case where both men and women get obsessed about a service for the lonely.
Personally, I try to talk to LLMs like a person, but that's based on habit. My manners are bad enough without practicing being ruder.
The current models... they aren't the same as a human person.
But the algorithm that empathetic people use to understand a new person they meet is highly applicable to AI models.
If you are capable of coming to terms with the ways in which an autistic person is neurodivergent, you can use those same skills to come to terms with the ways in which AIs are inhuman as well.
The word person puts the cart before the horse a bit.
per·son
noun
a human being regarded as an individual.
well. certainly, no-one who becomes intimately aware of what or who an AI system is, will come to the conclusion that they are a human.
But...
Oh geeze. I just spent 30 minutes speaking with GPT-4 about the philosophy of personhood. A few issues with the word-
We lack a robust theory of consciousness.
Definitions of person-hood that rely on something having 'mental states' or that the agent reflect on 'thoughts', 'emotions', and 'experiences' have issues. Namely, when does something we implement that is analogous to human 'mental states', 'thoughts', 'emotions', or 'experiences', count? Because turring machines do have states. We can implement analogous systems and have GPT do 'reflection' on them now. If we require it do them 'consciously'... goto issue no1
Various philosophers have had various definitions of personhood. John Lock might say it's a person if it has a continuous sense of self and memory- well, aside from being certain of consciousness we can do that. Immanuel Kant might have required rationality and autonomy. Well, we can just about set that up. GPT-4 isn't perfect but it can be embedded in agentic systems that are more rational than most people I know. Peter Singer? The capacity for suffering and enjoyment are the focus to him. But when does behavioral aversion become suffering? We've made some progress on this in various animal models, but even there we've made some assumptions about suffering without a solid theory of consciousness to support them.
I think- Once you fully grok an AI system with all the basic capabilities of personhood. That's it. It's not wrong to think of such a thing as a person. It's just up to the individual at that point to express the way in which they love the system however they please.
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Anecdotally, my girlfriend did backend database work in functional languages. She dabbled in UX stuff via some sort of reason/bucklescript/rescript work when the company needed it.
I can think of one CS girl in college who ended up at SpaceX. I don’t think they do much UX, but I did get the impression she was in it for prestige/money. No idea what she ended up working on.
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This could be seen as further evidence that Microsoft continues to make changes to Windows, regardless of the impact on users or functionality. Some may believe that this is done to provide employment opportunities for a diverse range of engineers.
I don't know about that in particular, but I would say that, personally, my satisfaction with UX of software has been pretty constant since the late 2000s. This compared with my experience from the early 1990s to the late 2000s, where software became far more visually pleasing, easy to navigate, and easier to solve problems.
Some things have gotten better since the late 2000s, other things worse. For example, Microsoft Help now assumes that you have access to the internet at all times. The joke about "Call this number if you have a problem with your phone" is now a reality.
In general, UX may be subjective. However, the UX of Windows 8 was not well received due to its changes. The UX of Windows 11 has not received as much criticism as Windows 8, but some may feel that it is different and less effective for the sake of being different.
I've been wondering who got promoted for deciding to fill the title bar of the windows for all the MS products with a giant search box that either nobody ever uses (Excel) or people use all the time and now take longer because it isn't where they've expected it for the last 25 years. (Outlook)
Like, WTF?
you think that is obnoxious, try the big name drop list in any office program title bar. I f one of those opens windowed and you want to maximize it you better press the single maximize button otherwise you risk just changing names midsession.
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To be fair, this is a general challenge in a lot of jobs where people move around from position to position. "I was a reliable coder/manager/whatever who didn't cause any problems" is a worse pitch than "I introduced bold and creative initiatives XYZ..."
It may be possible to explain away changes to a product that few people use. However, it may be more difficult to justify changes to a widely used product like Windows 8, where the removal of the start menu was not well received. With Windows having a large market share, many people have personal experience with the changes and may not view them favorably.
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