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To add to this, the difference is especially clear in the Minecraft “engineering” community. Minecraft is an incredibly popular game and 32% of its playerbase is female. While there are many women who play the game for decorative and beautifying projects, and whose content online is extremely popular, almost none of the great discoveries/innovations done with the redstone game mechanics are the result of female players. These creations are complex and can just be seen as engineering, like figuring out how to make Minecraft within Minecraft or creating an orbital cannon.
The only possible reason we see such a disparity is that men are vastly more likely to be interested in engineering discovery/invention in its own right, and are solely willing to spend all the hundreds of hours doing it. This is a strong reason why you may not want to incentivize women into important creative roles in engineering or academia. Women perform as well as men in occupational settings by and large, but if they lack the weird drive to dump hundreds of self-motivated hours into invention, the result will be a net loss for society where we won’t ever know the inventions we’ve missed out on. Anyone whose career involves creativity and discovery and invention needs to spend many self-motivated hours enjoying the process.
I don't follow the technical side very heavily, but are there any trans people in that category, either? It's pretty plausible that there's just not that many people on the very cutting edge at all, along with the typical 'males have higher variability' thing.
You do see that, though. I know of a couple modders who are actually pretty dedicated into Weird Things and are cis females (or in one case, trans male, for whatever that counts), including a few surprisingly big mods for tiny playerbases. (One, annoyingly, tends to drop projects because they get big interest.)
I followed technical minecraft a bit in the past, and iirc (hazy) the rate of transwomen was higher than the rate of women, but it was like 1 in 20 for transwomen, which is lower than something like rust
By comparison, the building nice-looking things area of minecraft has a ton of normal women and many fewer transwomen
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Agree with paragraph 1, including within Minecraft specifically.
For paragraph 2 - I'm not sure how much of an issue that specifically is, after we adjust for competence (i.e. hypothetical company without affirmative action). Maybe in roles like 'research-leading professor'? But women often do good work within e.g. FAANG-like software engineering, or in upper-management roles, like leading new products as a manager or leading technical development of a new component. Even the top 90% SWE isn't inventing new database paradigms every year, they're more likely to implement and tweak existing designs / papers. Ignoring considerations like 'the smartest women should be having kids instead bc their genes are better', a decent number of smart women in tech - given they're admitted based on merit, which they aren't entirely today - might not have the effect you suggest. I'm (genuinely) not sure here.
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