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I think the abundance of trans women (≈ women who were raised as boys) is proof the social conditioning the only factor in why there aren't more women in STEM fields. Women love this shit just as much as men, but they're actively steered away from it.
(Yes, women face other challenges beyond lack of exposure, but I think all of them can be traced back to social factors as well, such as how men are conditioned to treat women.)
I have a different theory.
When you buy a desktop or laptop 99.9% of them will come with Windows preinstalled. Unless you get an Apple product, but than its 100% macOS.
So everyone running Linux has chosen to not go for the easy option, but spend some time and effort to install something they prefer.
So that immediately is a filter, where people that just go for the default easy option are filtered out.
So it makes total sense the Linux community has more people that are not afraid to choose a path they perfer instead of just doing what everyone else does, because doing something else is harder and for many people scary.
My experience (and this is purely anecdotal) is that the hacker/cybersecuruty community is also like this and has a lot of trans people compared to the total population.
Your theory doesn't really hold up, because with that explanation you'd expect an abundance of trans woman in many other traditionally male dominated fields as well.
The more likely explanation is that both being trans and being heavily invested in Linux to the point you visit conferences correlate to being neurodivergent.
That said the other part is true: there are probably many women who's talent and interest in STEM was never properly nurtured. From my personal experience in the field I can say that my female colleagues are just as competent as my good male colleagues, but I'm yet to encounter a grossly incompetent female colleague. My theory is that woman need higher dedication and talent to overcome the adversary that unfortunately still exists, resulting in a higher skill floor.
I think neurodivergence is only part of it. As someone different, but not trans, who often dealt with discrimination for seeming obviously gay, part of the reason is that when dealing with people you can be nice and do everything right and be treated horribly because of being different, but computers have no bias. So if you do things right with computers, you win. Even with other subjects like math or science, there is some level of interacting with people who may be prejudiced that just isn't there when you spend 30 hours figuring out some new computer thing on your own. Also your interactions may be remote and involve more smart logical people. With math, usually some learning as to how to deal with hard problems needs to be done by interacting with people not via email or forums or lists. My point is I think some trans women could just as easily become great engineers or great mathematicians or grear car repair techs, but the nature of learning computers reducing disrespect.
Your conclusion is probably correct, but I don't think your proof works. I'm going to play devil's advocate now: The thing to consider here is that these women were not just raised as boys, they were also born as boys. They may be on HRT now, but what if there are differences between how the male and female brains work that come from the Y chromosome? Or your hormonal balance in your formative years? I would hope not because that gives sexists way too much ammo, but we do not know for sure.
There's other potential reasons for all the trans women in software engineering too. Children who don't feel comfortable in their own identities are probably way less social - I don't have enough trans friends to confirm this is true, but I feel like it might be. Not being particularly popular in school drives you to gaming as a hobby because you don't need friends for that, and at least in the 90s and 00s that would usually mean tinkering with your PC (because Windows never fucking worked properly, did it now). This would also explain all the furries IMO.
but what if there are differences between how the male brain and female brains work that come from the Y chromosome?
This assumes that trans women are born with a male brain. The consensus of the scientific community says that this is false - being born with a female brain in a male body is how someone is born trans which further supports the argument you are responding to.
I’m paraphrasing here but essentially the SRY gene (that stimulates production of androgens in a fetus) is released at a different time than the formation of the brain. So it is possible, but rare for someone to be born with a brain that doesn’t match their body and poof that’s where trans people come from.
EDIT:
I thought that the last state of the art opinion was that there is no reliable difference between the brains of the sexes? I am by no means informed on this.
Could that mean that at some point one could detect transgender people using medical testing?
I believe I recall reading something about this becoming a possible future ethical dilemma but I don’t have a source to cite right now.
That's quite interesting and actually a very useful step in proving what the comment above mine was trying to prove.