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Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by notadev on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:01PM (#33675235)
Does the tech field seem to be highly represented in the T part of LGBT? I can’t count how many times I’ve see a woman’s name as the maintainer of some software and thought, wow it’s awesome to see a woman working on something as low-level or esoteric or whatever and it almost always ends up being a trans woman. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just an observation.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by captnFwiffo on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:42PM (#33675641)
People used to say this about gay men and women in tech in the 1990s, so, ya know. The more things change the more they stay the same.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by JBits on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:12PM (#33675355)
More boys being encouraged to go into tech is a potential reason. However, personally I think the biggest reason is that lots of people with ASD are in tech, and there is an overlap between ASD and trans. All of the times I can remember where I came a across a trans women in programming, they also had ASD traits.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by dmix on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:19PM (#33675418)
ASD = Autism Spectrum Disorder (for those who didn't know)
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by eganist on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:05PM (#33675287)
> Does the tech field seem to be highly represented in the T part of LGBT? I can’t count how many times I’ve see a woman’s name as the maintainer of some software and thought, wow it’s awesome to see a woman working on something as low-level or esoteric or whatever and it almost always ends up being a trans woman. Absolutely nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

Possibly, or also possibly likely that people are more likely to come out when they feel less constrained to societal expectations (i.e there may be more LGBTQIA+ who are closeted outside of tech because of nonconformity-related fears). Whether it's one or the other (or both), these populations have always gravitated towards tech because tech was always the outcast thing to do.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by detaro on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:08PM (#33675302)
Tech has lots of places tolerant of people falling outside the "mainstream normal", pays well (which is quite useful for people who want to medically transition), and until quite a short time ago, niche online communities were probably one of the main avenues for people to understand what's going on with them and what they can do about it.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by rajin444 on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:15PM (#33675388)
Don’t trans females tend to be autistic? Given how well autistic individuals do in programming it isn’t surprising.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Tsiklon on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:12PM (#33675350)
The field seems to have comparatively visible representation, which is something I'm happy to see. An immediate question I have is how much of this change is because of society becoming thankfully more accepting of transpeople? Further by extension, in prior generations of tech workers how many are people who would have not felt able to present who they are?
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by forty on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:19PM (#33675416)
Your observation (which I noticed too) boils down to the under representation of biological women (both cis women and trans men) in the tech industry, due to cultural and societal reasons.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by alphabettsy on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:07PM (#33675301)
That hasn’t been my experience, but possibly the over-representation of males in the industry means trans people in tech are more likely to be trans women.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Gigachad on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:10PM (#33675327)
You wouldn’t notice if the maintainer was in the LGB part.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by TheNorthman on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:17PM (#33675410)
That's not his point...?
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by ThrowawayTestr on Saturday November 19, 2022 @07:05PM (#33676478)
I wonder why that is.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Gigachad on Saturday November 19, 2022 @07:19PM (#33676603)
There is no visual component to sexuality. Given that GitHub profiles are mostly just a name and profile pic, you can’t tell someone’s sexuality while you can easily tell if someone is trans.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Spivak on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:51PM (#33677642)
Ehhhhh this swerves into a long discussion about the stereotypes trans people face, how we have really narrow ideas about what men and women look like that leads to cis folks getting misgendered and the weird world of people who deny that passing trans folks exist.

HOWEVER, you can easily tell trans folks on github because their avatar will be an anime picrew.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by codefreeordie on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:32PM (#33675525)
Yes, this is a thing, and there are very significant structural reasons for it.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by factsarelolz on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:29PM (#33675493)
I have noticed the higher amount of T in the Tech Industry. I also noticed that most of the individuals are MtF, and a large percentage are also white.

A conspiracy theorist could weave this into: White men have a hard time getting past HR in the industry that is now bending over backwards to pull in more BIPOC and women, so they just dye their hair, pick some pronouns and land that job.

[dead]
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by ajsnigrutin on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:23PM (#33676063)
It's funny how these practices used to be (and in some places lucily still are) considered sexist and racist.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by smoldesu on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:04PM (#33675274)
It's more that the tech industry is recovering from centuries of raising women to avoid engineering roles.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by matheusmoreira on Saturday November 19, 2022 @05:56PM (#33675789)
I share your observations. I often find trans women behind very cool and interesting projects. I don't have any statistics or anything but it's certainly my personal experience.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by verytrivial on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:05PM (#33675876)
Females learn early that broadcasting your feminity comes with risks, largely from males. I think some trans people don't have that qualm, and on the contrary find clear use of female correlating names affirming. I also think I.T. has a larger proportion of the sort of neuro-divergence that correlates strongly with gender identity transition. I don't know why that is, and finding out why seems to have been made taboo, and don't expect any different on HN.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by libraryofbabel on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:16PM (#33675991)
I am a trans woman in tech. Yes, this is a thing. We joke about it all the time. (Even trans women who don’t work in tech constantly joke about the number of trans women who work in tech.) Certain fields and communities (security, Rust, other low-level stuff) have particularly strong representation.

The main reasons I’ve heard thrown around for this are: 1) Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows) and also correlate to high technical ability, 2) tech is generally fairly accepting of alternative lifestyles and identities, 3) if you were brought up as a boy you probably had more access to computers and were encouraged to go into that field, 4) if you were brought up as a boy but were actually trans, you probably preferred nerdy stuff to sports and computers were a good distraction from hating your body, 5) tech jobs have good healthcare.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by angry_octet on Saturday November 19, 2022 @08:01PM (#33676929)
I think we must give great weight to the fact there are prominent and proud trans techies -- it tells you that in tech you can be successful. In what other fields would you be as accepted?

There's also the need to be part of a community online, a community which is not physically accessible in most places, so the level of social media engagement is higher, and maybe that leads to tech and tech-adjacent work.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by randomsearch on Saturday November 19, 2022 @08:21PM (#33677060)
I feel like that acceptance (and I’ve worked at a few places that have just been amazingly supportive and accommodating, long before it was widely discussed) is somehow vaguely related to the way us nerds don’t care about formal dress. “You do you” is the nerd individualistic way, and that seems to apply to a wide range of things, including lifestyle choices, fashion, being trans, and many other axes. So long as you can do the work, who cares how you choose to present?

It’s a neat thing about nerdland.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Spivak on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:46PM (#33677611)
Well the running joke is that if you’re a trans woman your options are IT or sex work.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by libraryofbabel on Saturday November 19, 2022 @09:56PM (#33677670)
“Tech worker, sex worker, Starbucks barista — which of the three official trans girl professions are you?”

(Starbucks has famously good trans healthcare.)

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by Spivak on Saturday November 19, 2022 @10:02PM (#33677715)
Dang it! How could I forget Starbucks?

One of my friends legit quit her well paying tech job to work for Starbucks for like a year and a half because it saved her money

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by goldenchrome on Saturday November 19, 2022 @11:40PM (#33678314)
> Autism-spectrum traits correlate to being trans (why? nobody knows)

Here are some reasons:

- Autists tend to be uncoordinated which makes them feel uncomfortable in their own bodies, which is a feeling used to diagnose transgenderism.

- Autists are often outcasts, which can make men feel less masculine, which they may accidentally equate to being more feminine.

- It’s accepted in the literature that autists tend to be naive as they can’t read social cues properly. Compared to their more socially sensitive neurotypical peers, they are more likely to trust that others will genuinely perceive them as the opposite gender based on cues from social media alone.

- Autists tend to over-rationalize which can lead to thought spirals that cause them to convince themselves of something that a neurotypical person would think is unrealistic.

- Autists tend to lack social sensitivity which includes the absence of the ability to sense the subtle discomfort that people feel in their presence.

This is why trans women who are lesbians are extremely over represented compared to cis women.

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by notadev on Sunday November 20, 2022 @12:34AM (#33678615)
Thank you for your reply. All of the reasons you provided make sense, but number three was one I hadn't even considered. It seems so obvious once you pointed it out lol.
Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by 323 on Saturday November 19, 2022 @06:30PM (#33676125)
1. There's an overlap between T and the autistic spectrum. [1]

2. Autistic spectrum is over-represented in tech.

3. There are many more man in tech.

4. There are many more trans-woman than trans-man.

Multiply all these together and you get the phenomenon you observed.

[1] https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/transgender-and-gender-d...

Re:The erasure of women from online pregnancy literature by gaganyaan on Sunday November 20, 2022 @12:14AM (#33678511)
I now have a bet with myself whenever I see someone with a female name on the HN front page. The odds for woman vs trans woman are... not high.