My guess is that since Musk doesn't like "woke" too much (example in AI context here https://nitter.net/elonmusk/status/1603836383885332480), they don't do the "corporate diversity" thing where they try to evenly include different people in the PR shots. As to why women never made into the team organically, I have no idea specifically. I experienced that in tech, women to men ratio is around 1:10, so if there isn't even a single one in a group of dozen isn't suspicious to me.

Not really sure why this stands out to so many people. I believe the percentage of programmers who are women is something like 5-8%. Even being kind of generous, out of 12 people that would still not make an entire person.

Demographics might differ for AI researchers or other STEM fields adjacent but in general it seems odd to be surprised when it's literally how things have been for at least decades.

Not saying this is a good thing, that I know why it is like this, or what should be done if anything, I have no idea. But why act surprised? The gender ratio is super off balance for a lot of jobs. My career isn't that long but across four jobs, as far as I can remember, the ratio has remained about as skewed as publicly available metrics suggest it would be, not that I personally pay all that much attention.

For me, it’s because the idea of “understanding the true nature” of anything, with no perspective from half the planet’s population, is ludicrous.

Pretty sure the lofty mission statement is mostly marketing fluff for a run of the mill generative AI company. However, I'm not really sure if what you're saying makes that much sense. The truth is that at just 12 people, what they actually have is the perspective of 12 eight billionths of the people on earth. You can split by all kinds of attributes of people, race, gender, locality, ability, etc. and get a different answer.

I'm not trying to suggest in some roundabout way that this is good or even not bad, but it is rather arbitrary. In truth, "one person" rarely does anything, since in many senses, all of us stand on the shoulders of giants. But, even then, the accomplishments of individual people have been pretty impressive. There are singular people who have discovered the nature of a lot of things despite only having one perspective to bring on their own.

Every report I see indicates that ~20-25% of software engineers in the US are women.

For example:

https://www.celential.ai/blog/percentage-of-female-software-...

https://www.zippia.com/software-engineer-jobs/demographics/

Provide other data if you think that's wrong.

So, the very first result on Google gave me this:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1126823/worldwide-develo...

Which doesn't cite its source directly, but it's probably the Stack Overflow developer survey:

https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2022#section-demographics-ge...

Admittedly, that's not a great source for objective information since it is going to be skewed by the demographic that is responding.

However, this is the first time I'm hearing that the number is as high as 20%. In my career, the most women on the same team as me was literally 1, as far as I can remember.

Why does my experience differ so much?

This is true for employees in mainstream careers. Unfortunately it seems to not hold when looking at major open source projects, where gender diversity is routinely below 10% female. The picture gets even worse when proportioning representation by the quantity of changes/commits, where female representation is well below that.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2103.08763.pdf

Maybe unrelated but Musk is boosting a Tucker Carlson interview with Andrew Tate on his other thing right now.