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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>It's clearly a real pattern in open source. It's not just Rust and Go. And it's a stronger pattern than even being a FAANG engineer. I think it's because women are much less likely to take independent action solely on their own ideas and interests than men, and more likely to go with a socially-endorsed role. 'Spend a year making something that's open source, anonymously, just because you think the idea is good' isn't something there's a clear path you can 'follow a social gradient' towards to like 'having X job' does, and most open source projects just don't get interest. And (of course) explicit discrimination of any sort is a poor explanation, seeing as open source projects are anonymous - and both the overrepresentation of males and transes remains when you only look at 'open source projects made by people without employment or formal training in programming'
Said more clearly: The rate of being trans among techies (pretty high, but still <10%) isn't low enough that it outweighs the 'women don't do entirely independent self-driven activity' effect.
To add to this, the difference is especially clear in the Minecraft “engineering” community. Minecraft is an incredibly popular game and 32% of its playerbase is female. While there are many women who play the game for decorative and beautifying projects, and whose content online is extremely popular, almost none of the great discoveries/innovations done with the redstone game mechanics are the result of female players. These creations are complex and can just be seen as engineering, like figuring out how to make Minecraft within Minecraft or creating an orbital cannon.
The only possible reason we see such a disparity is that men are vastly more likely to be interested in engineering discovery/invention in its own right, and are solely willing to spend all the hundreds of hours doing it. This is a strong reason why you may not want to incentivize women into important creative roles in engineering or academia. Women perform as well as men in occupational settings by and large, but if they lack the weird drive to dump hundreds of self-motivated hours into invention, the result will be a net loss for society where we won’t ever know the inventions we’ve missed out on. Anyone whose career involves creativity and discovery and invention needs to spend many self-motivated hours enjoying the process.
I don't follow the technical side very heavily, but are there any trans people in that category, either? It's pretty plausible that there's just not that many people on the very cutting edge at all, along with the typical 'males have higher variability' thing.
You do see that, though. I know of a couple modders who are actually pretty dedicated into Weird Things and are cis females (or in one case, trans male, for whatever that counts), including a few surprisingly big mods for tiny playerbases. (One, annoyingly, tends to drop projects because they get big interest.)
I followed technical minecraft a bit in the past, and iirc (hazy) the rate of transwomen was higher than the rate of women, but it was like 1 in 20 for transwomen, which is lower than something like rust
By comparison, the building nice-looking things area of minecraft has a ton of normal women and many fewer transwomen
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Agree with paragraph 1, including within Minecraft specifically.
For paragraph 2 - I'm not sure how much of an issue that specifically is, after we adjust for competence (i.e. hypothetical company without affirmative action). Maybe in roles like 'research-leading professor'? But women often do good work within e.g. FAANG-like software engineering, or in upper-management roles, like leading new products as a manager or leading technical development of a new component. Even the top 90% SWE isn't inventing new database paradigms every year, they're more likely to implement and tweak existing designs / papers. Ignoring considerations like 'the smartest women should be having kids instead bc their genes are better', a decent number of smart women in tech - given they're admitted based on merit, which they aren't entirely today - might not have the effect you suggest. I'm (genuinely) not sure here.
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There are a lot of hobbies women have shown plenty of initiative and creativity in. It's just that the type of hobbies an average woman dedicates her leisure time to tends to be very different than that of men.
Most women seem to have a lower tolerance for hobbies that do not have some level of Social affirmation and interaction along the process. They are not as easily nerd sniped as men are.
I can blow a whole weekend, not speaking to a single soul, working on some obscure programming project like writing a TiddlyWiki launcher to reduce memory usage over the default Node.js launcher. A pointless investment of effort that will be of limited help for my employment prospects. No one else is going to use it or even see it. But it's fun though!
Women here make smarter choices. They demand more from their hobbies rather than just a short burst of satisfaction from solving some obscure problem. At the very least they expect it to have Social value. Though this may be changing with Social media addiction.
Footnote:
Reading what I wrote above, I realize, I have issues.
Dude, read some of my Friday Fun Thread posts. That sounds like a perfect weekend. It keeps you sharp.
I wonder if this behavior is truly more effective. It has a downside where one may feel unmotivated to do anything if no one is there to see them do it. They may also find it difficult to start tasks or leisure activities unless they have a group to join them.
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It's not that women don't have "initiative" or "creativity" - plenty of female FAANG engineers show those. But a women is much less likely to ... purely of her own initiative, never having heard of the idea before. I agree, generally.
Not sure what this means, tbh? Your example weekend sounds fine. It also builds skill and technique for future, useful projects. How is it worse than gossiping about celebrities with friends in any way? There doesn't have to be a "you really WANT friendship but suppress that desire by doing lonely projects" psychoanalytic "issues", coding can just have something interesting that predominant forms of casual social interaction don't.
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