I run the annual State of JavaScript developer survey, and I was thrilled to see survey respondents more than double this year from 16,085 in 2021 ...
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I wonder, if there was a concerted effort to do outreach to communities of women who program, such as Women Who Code, Girls Who Code, and the many other communities who focus on the demographic, whether more women would fill out the survey. It's asking for a little commitment of time - and many women have many claims on their time, of which this might rank lower than for other groups. In my experience, outreach makes a world of difference
I always try to set aside time for outreach, but sadly –speaking about my own personal experience here– I tend to get a very low response rate to these emails. It makes sense I guess, cold emailing organizations to ask for favors is always a long shot.
Can't say much about cis women, but in trans circles I notice a lot of "thanks for the link but I'm not knowledgeable enough to take that survey" type responses, and it's really annoying sometimes because more often than not that's not true and even if it was, hearing from beginners is valuable information as well (and it's not like cishet male beginners aren't a big part of the respondents anyway)
Maybe a bit more emphasis on the fact that it's not a survey of the leading experts, but anyone who uses the technology on a semi-regular basis could somewhat help in overcoming this, but again, I can't say whether this applies widely or is just a statistical anomaly in my friend group.
I think you already might know this, but you don't have to go this alone. There's a lot of work that can be done just by including others in your process.
I think we've talked before about the inclusion of a11y in the survey, and my offer to help with some of these logistics or just even provide early feedback still applies.
That would be awesome! Would you be able to join our Discord maybe?
This is, at the end of the day, a matter of linguistics; a field that has long ago formed the consensus that words just mean what people understand them to mean, so "gender" can really be anything.
The dogmatic reluctance to accept any change in definition is almost always politically motivated. An attempt to control discourse by controlling vocabulary, and to lend credibility to the non-existence of a concept by refusing to put a label on it.
It has never been a scientifically sound argument, and shouldn't be dwelt on for too long. It's a red herring.
There's many models for defining gender, really.
I like the simplicity of self-identification; and it's probably the most viable on a societal level, as it is by far the easiest to evaluate and has so far proven to have an incredibly small error rate (No, there isn't any noticeable number of people "pretending" to be another gender, that's just not a thing).
But that isn't to say we can't form more specific models of what gender ultimately is, at its core. That's just not the same discussion, because we can't look into people's heads and transcribe what we see onto their ID cards. We also can't look into people's heads to figure out their "biological" pronouns.
So the whole "someone who identifies as x" is really just the practical side of it. It's a rule of thumb to guide our behaviours, based on the idea that other people are both sentient and reasonable, and can probably be trusted to tell us who they are. We can' give better explanations of what gender is. Those are just not practical in everday life.
It's funny because I've probably had this user-name for longer than you've been allowed on the internet. And I'm not just talking about your 1-day-old sockpuppet account with a suspiciously similar naming scheme to the other 1-day-old sockpuppet account in the conversation.
Either way, setting your ad-hom cope aside, a strict binary of biological sex has no basis in reality and none of the "arguments" for it are even consistent, nor conclude in an actual binary.
Chromosomal sex isn't a binary.
Gamete types aren't a binary.
Genitalia aren't a binary.
Secondary characteristics aren't a binary.
Gender isn't a binary.
And worst of all, none of these necessarily align and if you bundle them all up you just end up with more and more degrees of freedom that allow for countless permutations. At that point, best you can do is to identify clusters of data-points. Gender isn't a binary.
Yet you insist that sex is a binary against all evidence. That is dogma.
It's very telling how you're entirely dismissing any possible violence (including sexual assault) between men in prison. This isn't about violence in prison, this is about hating and demonising trans people.
I'm not going to read all of that word salad, and I'm not going to attempt to fix your arrogance. You clearly think you're smarter than all the experts in many fields of science, ranging from biology to linguistics, and without even understanding the foundations of the current consensus in any of those fields. You're beyond help.
Here's my theory - studies have shown women have higher workloads than men, both professionally and at home. They don't have time to be sitting around watching all these YouTubers and whatnot because they've got things to do. I only know about these surveys because a coworker shared them in a group chat years ago and now I get alerts when new surveys come out, so I take them. The dev teams i've been on have been about 60% male/40% female so every time I see ~7% of respondents are female, I chuckle a little and wonder why.
A similar point came up in a discussion about why there was a majority of male applicants wanting to speak at conferences and meetups. The organizer said they observed that men were more likely to abandon their chores and care work in favor of preparing a talk, prioritizing their ego over family duties.
That's a good point! I think having children especially puts more stress on women compared to men. I know that studies have shown that kids impact women's career more than men's overall, and I wouldn't be surprised if that same kind of pattern also affected the demographics studied in the article.
That's just a cognitive bias. The environment you are in does not represent whole industry.
It would be a cognitive bias if I claimed the whole industry had a 60%/40% split (assuming that is what you are referring to). I was simply stating I have always found the difference between the results and my experience interesting. A quick Google search shows the actual breakdown is more like ~75%/25%, which is still far off from the survey results.
Yes according to the data gathered by Sacha, a perfect balance is probably not achievable, as the distribution at industry-level is itself skewed. In the short run, I think we should aim for a minimum 10% of non-male respondents to produce more representative results, and ideally start a virtuous circle.
It’s been proven that women tend not to apply to a job advert where they don’t meet 100% of the criteria. Men, on the other hand will almost always apply for a job they meet less than 100% of the criteria for.
I wonder if the same effect is at play for survey respondents? I have to admit from my own experience that the State of JS survey is demoralising for me because of how many technologies I’ve never heard of or used before.
It’s ridiculous because I understand the survey is gathering data on up and coming trends, but I can see that demoralising feeling being enough to make a more junior me feel like the survey isn’t targeted at me.
I am of course a sample size of one.
Yes the overall conclusion from all the feedback I'm seeing is that this might be the main problem we need to address. Not quite sure how yet but it's encouraging to at least know in what direction to look!
Yep, this sounds familiar. I sent the link to the state of JS survey to a friend who has done some JS stuff and her response was something along the lines of "I don't know enough to take that survey". So that could be a fairly common problem.
This may be a bit long, but just giving my experience as a woman in the swe industry.
As a woman who's been a swe for over 4 years, I got in as a career transition from academics. There could be a combination of reasons for why there's less women in the swe industry, and I think one part of it is potentially that the field of swe did not seemed to be as inviting, like math wasn't as inviting to me growing up. Most of the guys in my classes were the top performers in maths, and I always thought I'm like Amy Tan and my skill was writing. But later on I found programming and I really enjoyed it. Most of the people I worked with early on was mostly males, and because I play a male dominant sports, I was used to be one of the very few females in a group. But I would say that in terms of mentorship I got a bit of it, but it did feel that during my time getting into the field, it was both a battle of filling in gaps of knowledge, adjusting to corporate culture, adopting a new identity of being a "technical" person, and also trying to push through even though there was little representation of my gender and/or race. But I still haven't given up, and if it weren't for those early years 5-6 years ago when online learning took off, and focus on teaching folks how to learn became a thing, I wouldn't be where I am now. And I hope that more people with empathetic mindsets and technical inclination do step up into the field because it opens the doors of swe industry from what I earlier on perceived as a simply cold calculated field to one where it's about innovation and creativity.
Thanks for sharing this. I like your point about online learning, it's something that has really taken off in the last decade or so and it might take a little bit more time before we see its effects.
But why would the natural conclusion of all this be "we need separate prisons for biological men and women"?
If there are opportunities for sexual assault because inmates do not have their own individual safe spaces and have to share a room for example, isn't that the actual problem we should address, i.e. prison overcrowding? Men can sexually assault each other, and so can women. Can you see why the fact that you specifically chose to stigmatize trans women for it can come across as bigoted?
I see you're more interested in asserting your dogma than finding the truth, so I see no reason to continue this discussion
As I have pointed out, for the purpose of society and law, self-ID is the easiest, most accurate and overall most viable way of defining gender. So no, any other definition is irrelevant and purely a matter of philosophy, which is not a discussion you seem equipped for.
You blatantly deny any progress science is making in this field and pretend none of it exists, as long as it doesn't confirm your dogmatic faith in the binary nature of sex and its 100% overlap with gender. Just because you don't want to understand, doesn't mean the rest of society has to wait for you. Catch up or get left behind.
No and this is a non-issue. Everyone agrees on this. You're just trying to frame your actual point as more reasonable, which is that you disagree whether sex or gender is a better metric in some specific circumstances. But that makes it sound like both sides might have valid points, so you'd rather pretend there's some gender conspiracy that wants to abolish the concept of sex.
Yes. In medical contexts, for example, it is important to distinguish people's biological realities more so than their gender. This does not mean that you shouldn't do so while respecting their identity, though, so going out of ones way to, say, call a trans man a biological woman is still morally wrong, just like calling someone an insignificant sac of meat is biologically correct, but very clearly an attempt at being offensive.
Yes. There is absolutely no ground to stand on to attack this. No people don't believe they're literally cats, no matter how much people insist on this weird fantasy they made up to attack trans people.
In 95% of cases it means she's a woman, end of story. Is there any reason for you to know what's between her legs? No? Then it's none of your business. The burden of proof is on you if you think it is somehow relevant what their chromosomes say.
Yes. That's the point of gendered dressing rooms, in so far that there even is one outside of a heteronormative and sexist idea that women need to be protected from male sexuality and men need to be protected from the temptation of female bodies.
Yes. This isn't as much of a problem as people make it out to be. Actual age will still be real as much as biology is still real despite accepting people's genders. And just the act of identifying as a different age, or hell, even as an attack helicopter doesn't impact you whatsoever. Nobody is going to sue you over not exploding after they made helicopter noises and gestured launching rockets at you.
If gender is entirely subjective, then there is no error rate. If gender is some sort of unmeasurable but real phenomenon in the human mind, then there can be an error rate (and the error rate will not be measurable either, so we'll only ever have a rough idea based on our intuition on individual cases).
Gender is not unrelated from one's sex. They are two distinct but adjacent phenomena. Nobody outside of tumblr is denying this. This also does not conflict with the existence of gender identities not based in biological sex.
The same way you know they're not all plotting to murder you: By acknowledging that you matter way less to people than they themselves and if they're telling you something about themselves it's vastly more likely that it's actually true than an intricate lie to hurt you in some way, specially if that lie isn't even necessary.
Because most people aren't criminals. As for your article, sorry but articles aren't science. And I'm not going to do your work of finding the actual study and reading it only for it to be the 100th time some "data" turns out to either a) contradict the vast majority of other studies or b) turn out to be so fundamentally flawed that only a transphobic cretin could ever take it seriously. This is how you people strategically waste our time.
So anyway, closing statement:
You're wrong, and this sea lion wants its job back.
I'm just observing that there is a severe under-representation of women in tech, and the only reason that might be is that there's something keeping them out. It's that keeping out part that I have a problem with, not so much the actual demographic.
As for bending things to my will, you seem to have it all wrong. Most people don't want to exclude women or non-binary people from tech. The ones trying to bend things to their will are people who want to prevent inclusion from happening.
What even drives you to an article about a topic that you supposedly don't have any interest in, just to point out how much it annoys you? I'd get being indifferent to women in tech, but why are you being actively offended by the idea?
Privileged people (like me) often (used to) take their situation for granted but still subconsciously act to sustain it. As a white male tech expert, it might feel natural and productive to hire for "culture fit", but that means hiring more white male dudes and bros instead of a more open minded outlook for diversity and equality with the benefit of bringing new perspectives and inspiration as well.
Thank you for taking the time to do an in-depth analysis of the gender ratio of your surveys. I've been taking the surveys for about five years now, and every year I am painfully disappointed by the ratios, but not surprised given that the ratio accurately reflects my current working environment (sigh, AWS).
In regards to the YouTubers in particular, the sample size of me and a few of my past female colleagues says that we don't generally gravitate towards video content. For me personally, I just don't have time to watch anything during the workday, and if I want to learn something new, I'll choose the blog post with coding examples I can copy/paste and try out over any other medium. It's the same for podcasts - I can't just listen to something about JavaScript to learn, I need to have my VS Code open while I'm absorbing new information so I can put it to use and solidify the knowledge.
I'll confess that I don't really watch coding YouTubers either, even though a lot of them put out great content, probably just for lack of time.
But anecdotally, looking at the State of JS data, while some video creators have low women ratios, others have about the same 5% ratio as the survey overall – possibly indicating that it boils down more to individual YouTuber style more than a gender-based video-watcher vs non-video-watcher divide?
For sure! I guess my aim in pointing that out would be to encourage looking into the gender ratios of other mediums, like those who follow tech bloggers or documentation, to get a more holistic picture.
This is going to be rather controversial but I will still share my anecdotal experience as coding bootcamp teacher, specializing mostly in frontend and a bit of DevOps, sample size being around 100-150 students, 25% being female identifying. Trainings were mostly remote.
There certainly seem to be some striking differences..
In short, and this is generalizing a fair bit of course, I find female identifying students more close to "average" students, whereas male students are often my worst and also my best students (more active around the extremes).
I also think that in order to thrive as an engineer, you need very strong inherent curiosity about how things work. I am like this, and I usually recognize when others are like this just by having a short conversation with them. I recognize this trait a lot more often with folks who identify as male, and I think this has a fair bit to do with the gender disparity inside the Tech industry, specifically for engineers. This is okay, in a free world we should all be able to choose our profession based on our interest, if that's different between the genders, on average, than that's fine by me. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't continue our efforts to make tech more inviting to women, because there are probably women out there who would thrive as an engineer, but get discouraged to try, based on societal/cultural norms.
Thanks for sharing your experience! The thing I get from your post is that we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that different individuals can have different learning styles – and that gender is of course one of the many factors that can impact said learning style – while at the same time not pigeon-holing anybody solely on that basis.
But I also want to caution against succumbing too much to pattern-matching against our own preferences. For example you say that "in order to thrive as an engineer, you need very strong inherent curiosity about how things work". But I would not describe myself that way, instead my own drive is more along the line of "making cool things, without really caring how they work as long as they do" :)
I realize this doesn't fit the "traditional" mindset of an engineer (and maybe this is why I don't consider myself one despite doing a lot of the same things practically speaking) but I think it can be just as valuable to have more result-oriented people in the mix.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that this mindset difference specifically has anything to do with gender, but it's an example where we risk assuming that "all engineers think this way, therefore only people who think that way can be engineers", just like we risk assuming that "all engineers are men, therefore only men can be engineers".
I think it falls in the same category, because in order to build cool things, you must understand how things work well enough to be able to build them. There's a subtle difference between wanting it to just work versus nerding out over how exactly things work "under the hood" in great detail, but I still think that without a basic curiosity of how things work, you wouldn't be motivated to build cool things; you wouldn't think of them as being "cool", you'd merely consider them "useful" as a consumer. The fact that you want to build them rather than only use them, to me, shows this inherent curiosity or intrigue about things and how they work (even if that "how" can be on varying levels).
And yeah I fully agree that we must always be mindful of bias and pigeon-holing, there is more overlap between genders than difference, and the differences are just averages, statistics, generalizations (useful as they may be). Ultimately, individuals must be treated as individuals first.
What a time to be alive when stating that men and women have obvious genetic leaning preferences is a controversial idea (that guy from google got fired for it a couple years back) and when we have to speak in terms of "male/female identifying" and can't just say men and women.
I really hope we get past this phase and laugh about the absurdity some day... sigh
It's not language I would normally use, but given the article is written in this language and I am replying to it, I find it basic politeness to try to speak in their language. Reading back what I wrote, I noticed I failed towards the end of my reply to be consistent with it. Oh well..
I definitely wasn't criticizing your use of the language, just that it even needs to be done that way. Everyone is walking on egg shells these days regarding this topic. It's the same in all the other comments here..
I agree that this kind of language feels a bit clunky, and might even come across as non-inclusive as it risks establishing a divide between "women" and "people who identify as women".
In my opinion, we should ideally just talk about "women" or "female" and understand that to mean "people who identify as women", unless we go out of our way to specify "biological women" (and of course, same thing for men).
But since not everybody sees it that way and there is still a lot of ambiguity around this vocabulary, I thought it only prudent to try and be more explicit in my own writing.
Right, the trans folks in my social circle, I just refer to their gender, the one they identify as, and usually dress as (I still think fashion is one of the most reliable ways to determine someone's gender, although asking them instead of assuming is always appreciated in my experience, when uncertain..). I feel like no one in the real world uses "biological women" / "identifying as ..." label. It's just woman/man, no one seems to get so semantic about it unless they're debating "gender ideology" on Twitter or they're afraid of getting lynched online for not adhering to gender language etiquette (like me, tbh).
I've quite literally written a blog post where none of the content was discussed whatsoever, the only focus was on my use of "visually impaired vs normal-visioned" which was considered ableist language (which I understand btw, but come on..). Ironically, my post was meant to share knowledge on accessibility and helping disabled folks, but this intent was completely lost, because people were angry about my choice of words.
I think maybe it is time to do the seven/five whatever whys, because I think the ratio is skewed waaaay earlier. I remember coming from a male only Catholic high school to the computer science uni, all ready to mingle with the other gender, only to realize that the gender ratio was there 1:10 for boys. Surprisingly the corporate workplace softened this ratio and did not make it worse in the places I worked at.
This means we lost the other half of developer population before age 18. So why is that? I still have 0 clue.
What we need here is a huge research, both quantitative and qualitative, including anthropologists, neuroscientists (maybe there is a very interesting cross section with neurodiversity - that's why ADHD and autism is overrepresented in engineering?) and so on, both mostly asking hundreds and hundreds on women, who ventured into software engineering, who stayed, who stopped it or who once considered it but never started learning it to learn:
Even if you were right that up until recently "gender" was commonly understood to be the same thing as "biological sex", why can't that change?
In a way it's lucky that we happen to already have two existing terms. So instead of having them overlap in meaning just reassign gender to the "new" meaning! Plus you don't even need any surgery for that particular gender reassignment, just a little bit of open-mindedness :)
I think the new meaning of "x" is "someone who identifies as x". It might be a circular definition, but so are most words if you think about it. The meaning of "red" is "something that has the color red" and everyone seems just fine with that.
But the issue about having a debate about all this on a purely semantic level is that it's not a morally neutral debate. Doing that ignores the experience of actual human beings who are being hurt by these very semantics.
So I feel like even if you personally feel like this doesn't conform to your own sense of what is or isn't "observable material reality", the impulse to be kind to other humans should be enough to make you overlook that somewhat minor inconvenience.
Thank you Sacha. This inspires me to do more to support women in tech.
Will someone think of the heterosexual white men!!!!!
I've heard that demographic referred to as White Heterosexual Men of Privilege, a.k.a. WHMPs. I'll let you guess how that's pronounced :)
Yes, how cute. I'm glad a racist, sexist slur brings a smile to your face, Sacha.
It's funny how so many of us were quite fine with smiling at actual racist and sexist slurs for so long, yet now that there is the tiniest bit of pushback the smallest perceived slight against us suddenly becomes a reason to feel aggrieved…
I guess you speak for yourself if you think it was ever fine to use sexist, racist slurs in the past or that it’s ok to normalize such slurs today so long as they are directed at the right group of people. I understand this casual racism is very in-fashion among a certain clique, of which you clearly see yourself.
I'm trans you fucking asshole
I also think it's interesting that whenever someone makes a comment disparaging the role of white men in perpetuating patriarchal & punitive gender norms, someone from whoever is perceived as the "same team" calls them a self-righteous "white knight". I personally welcome all cishet men that speak out against transphobia, but I do question why you think you're on a team that needs to be perpetuated.
I'm a trans woman, just like I told you earlier. Stop misgendering me.
Racism against white people doesn't exist because there is no system behind it. The same goes for being sexist towards men - there is no system built, hence the "ism". Please educate yourself.
Hahahahahaha. Thank you, Tay. You've made my day.
Awesome! thanks
I appreciate this "My hope is that writing about the gender imbalance issue will help me reach the very audience that is currently under-represented in the survey". That's a good idea and point. Although I believe that you shouldn't need to apologize for collecting data? In which ways this survey was closed to diverse genders? This is literally data, you asked a question and 93% of responders were men, and that's about it. You could ask why that's the case and draw an hypothesis but that's about it (which I think it's the point of your article). It'll take time until other genders/races/etc join the field (if they want/can to of course). I get the feel that we're trying to force our will on reality, maybe they'll never be balance gender representation across fields, maybe there will.
I'd argue that, when making a survey like this, which some might take as a measurement of the opinions within the community, one has a certain responsibility to at least try getting representative results. So it's not like "it's just data" is a perfect excuse. At the end of the day, producing skewed data means producing bad data, and if that data fails to represent some situation because of a lack of quality, then that can lead to worse outcomes for people.
So while I agree that not reaching enough women isn't an irredeemable sin, it is worth addressing and trying to fix.
Two points I've mentioend elsewhere:
This isn't about how many women are in tech, it's about women being under-represented in the study even relative to their representation in the industry overall, so that's a data problem more than a social problem.
The problem isn't so much that the industry somehow needs a 1:1 ratio of men to women to function. It probably wouldn't matter much if it was 100% men or 100% women, if that just happened naturally. The point is that there's no reason to believe the current under-representation of women is just a thing that happens on its own, so it's reasonable to assume that something is artificially upholding this skewed gender ratio and that's where the problem is. Getting more data from women in surveys like this might also be a piece to that puzzle.
Great point! I think many people miss that. I also think that even if a profession hypothetically had a more reasonable 60/40 balance, there is always a risk of the majority (however slight) imposing its own norms and culture, which in the future might turn away people belonging to the minority from joining it, and keep making that imbalance more and more acute.
Obviously that's not always true otherwise every profession would end up being just as heavily gendered as programming is, but I do think it's worth keeping in mind that these imbalances are often self-perpetuating.
This isn't a revolutionarily new idea, but I'm sure this exact mechanism is how many forms of segregation come to be; by feedback loops that re-enforce very tiny differences (even differences that aren't even relevant anymore).
My take on why programming suffers so much from this is that it just has some qualities, inherent or not, that make it very susceptible for this type of feedback loop. Maybe it's the strong focus on mentorship that seems to exist in some parts of the field, maybe it's the constantly changing environment that favours people with connections who can predict what technology they should learn. Either way, it's not like programming is the only field with this problem and there's others where the gender imbalance goes the other way, so it's not like this is mysteriously only affecting our field alone.
I'm curious to know where this fact comes from "it's about women being under-represented in the study even relative to their representation in the industry overall"
It's a bit hard to assert this as a fact because there is no definition of what "the industry" even is, especially on a worldwide level. So maybe a better way to phrase this would be that there are clearly sub-communities of "the industry" that have a better gender balance, and we would like the State of JS audience to become one of them.
Right, that make sense. I think that was the assumption I was trying to point out. We think that the "community" (whatever that means) has a certain shape that we're trying to reflect... but the data is showing a different thing to what we would want or expect. I would personally love to see more diversity and I try to do my share but I also wouldn't want to become blind to facts
woow! that is awesome
Thanks for looking at this in details. Very interesting.
Colour is binary because there are two, and only two of them:
Wave-lengths can vary. But they are not colour. It isn't dogmatic to insist on this as there is preponderance of scientific evidence to support it.
Gamete sex, which is one I very rarely see brought up in online discussion (maybe shout at all your fellow transwphobes who defend chromosomal sex, because clearly they're more wrong than I am), is not a binary: People can produce big gametes, small gametes, or no gametes. Your video already tries to wiggle itself out of this hard fact by using some vague phrasing like "body plan that produces ... gametes", so clearly they already know that their argument is fallacious. And if you want to follow the line of reasoning of that body plan, well you end up at hormones and chromosomes and your binary just goes out the window entirely.
Again, this is well known. Your position is silly and all arguments for it come down to "but I don't want there to be more genders".
I'm sorry, but after your first two points, I just can't take you seriously anymore. Please spend some time reading up on those words you use, because it is painfully obvious you don't have the slightest clue what any of them mean.
The mere suggestion that the "univariate fallacy" may apply to biological sex already presupposes that sex is, in fact, not a binary, but a multi-dimensional space in which we can identify clusters (which is exactly how I have described it on multiple occasions in this comment section).
It is also not a motte and bailey to clearly distinguish sex and gender, and use the right word in each context.
And just to avoid future misconceptions: It is also not an ad-hominem that I am questioning your intelligence. I am not implying you're wrong because you're ignorant, I'm deducing your ignorance from how wrong you are.
Regardless, you have shown, repeatedly, that you lack either the interest, or the capacity, or maybe both for having an honest discussion about an issue that is not up for debate anyway. I won't be answering to any more of your incoherent hateful ramblings. Have a good day (or don't, I can't force you).
I've got a mail from you where you state that dev communities is suffering from gender imbalance
"Read the article to find out if Fireship, freeCodeCamp, Scrimba, and more, also suffer from the same kind of gender imbalance"
Can you explain me how do they suffer? Whats so bad?
In this case "suffer" should be understood as "is affected by". But taking your question literally, I think my chat with Jack Herrington showed that he's quite disheartened by the poor gender diversity of his own audience – so yes you might say that he does "suffer" on some level (and obviously the people who don't feel represented in the industry suffer too, but that goes without saying).
If we see it from a purely scientific point of view, it makes the survey data harder to exploit for researchers or library makers and companies that care about the survey results.
At which % of women in the respondents can we consider that the results of the survey are representative of the reality of the community? I'm curious about how strong the skew is in the results, to know how much to adjust for it. For example, dataprot.net/statistics/women-in-t... doesn't send a clear picture.
At the moment, I am thinking of it like so:
Someone mentioned in another comment that the ratio is somewhere around 3:1, so that would be the goal for the poll to be representative. Of course, even then there's still the question of why the industry as a whole is that skewed in the first place, so it's not like work ends there.
That's not true though. It's more accurate to say sex is bi-modal. There is two clear clusters that we can identify as biologically male and female, but there is many outliers and even within the clusters there is no absolute uniformity. And that's without even considering that gender might itself have a strong biological component, in which it could be perceived as one of many sex characteristics, further undermining the idea of a sex binary.
Either way, sex is entirely irrelevant to this discussion, as the survey didn't even ask about it. The data we have is about gender so that's what we're discussing.
It's called reality. Calling it an ideology won't make the truth go away.
That's, to put it simply, not true. Just because Western countries have built their laws and systems off of the idea that the nuclear family is the main economic unit for their society does NOT mean that other genders have never existed - they have, and STILL, exist, and they will always continue to exist long past the demise of Western society.
I always find it exhausting when people like you refuse to open up their imagination to the slightest possibility of people being remotely different from what you're used to. Maybe just grow up!