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 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.