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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.
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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