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by panda_person 4998 days ago
Here's an example from my own experience: There's a significant number of trans women who work in tech. And almost all of them started transitioning as adults, in their 20s and 30s. So, they had the "benefit" of male socialization growing up, and being encouraged more to dabble in computers/tech/engineering. Much fewer trans men (and non trans women) in tech, it seems.

Also, the number of women historically majoring in CS dropped off significantly in the 1980s, when 1. Video gaming culture started to take off and 2. Hardware (something seen as more masculine) started to be emphasized more often. Like, programming historically was something women with math and CS degrees did, then I think there was a greater influence of hardware and tinkering with your hands that was part of being in tech. Stuff that is traditionally seen as more masculine.

1 comments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transsexualism#Prevalence

The DSM-IV (1994) quotes a prevalence of roughly 1 in 30,000 assigned males and 1 in 100,000 assigned females seek sex reassignment surgery in the USA.

So there's a 3x factor feeding into that.

Those numbers are based on statistics from the 1960s, when transitioning was next to impossible, and are probably a couple orders of magnitude too low. More to the point, that threefold difference seems to be much smaller, if it exists at all.