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by lbn 3649 days ago
How come there are as many women (47) answering this survey as trans people? Is there anything in the Rust community that is hostile to women but not trans people?

In fact trans people appear to be over-represented in this survey as 1.7% of people in it were trans compared to optimistic 0.3% of the US being transgender [0]

[0] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-the-US-population-i...
2 comments
k__ 3648 days ago
Most female devs I know are trans women. So maybe they are over-represented in the dev-world in general?
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viraptor 3648 days ago
Hostile may be jumping to conclusions. It's a small number, and it's a self-selected sample. Small change in any of the numbers will result in big ratio change. Unless someone actually claims hostile behaviour, why expect it?

Either way, the trans population is very much overrepresented in the survey. You took one of the sources from the link which claims 0.3%. The next source which I would trust (DSM-5 stats) claims 0.005-0.014% natal male and 0.002-0.003% natal female for gender dysphoria.

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lbn 3648 days ago
The reason I said hostile is that in most discussions on Hacker News and Reddit a lot of people argue that the only reason women are so under-represented in tech is that all the guys are very hostile to women. This survey goes against that. For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.
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viraptor 3648 days ago
> For some reason they refuse to believe that some things are more interesting to women than men and vice versa.

It could be that this is just as wrong as the "only hostility is the problem". Not everybody sees the same barriers. Not everyone faces the same challenges. We don't even know if/what's more interesting, because we're bombarded with ideas of what should be more interesting since very young age. Software engineers I know successfully raise girl geeks for example.

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badsock 3648 days ago
In different cultures (e.g. Russia), and different time periods (e.g. the 80's), the level of interest and participation from women is/was much, much higher. I would say that's a pretty objective reason for believing that it's cultural and not biological.

What I find hard to believe is that some people don't think that women get treated differently than men, or that that wouldn't matter when it comes to people choosing to participate in certain communities.

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