Autism and gender imbalance in tech
Weird blog post. He never really attempts to answer his own question of if gender imbalance is a good thing. He just seems to be making the point that autism is imbalanced in sex distribution, and engineering is appealing to autistic people, so the imbalance in engineering is expected due to autism.<p>FWIW, as a woman on the autism spectrum myself, I actually kind of agree that some level of imbalance is due to this. But people on the autism spectrum make up such a small population of humans and software engineers (we are over-represented compared to other industries, but in my experience we are still very much a minority overall) that it cannot be nearly enough to account for the sex-imbalance numbers we see today.<p>Anecdotally, I&#x27;ve convinced two NT (neurotypical) women to switch from bio&#x2F;chem degrees to CS (they are both software engineers now) and the reason they hadn&#x27;t considered before was b&#x2F;c nobody ever talked to them about it. Neither grew up  playing video games (though one said she asked for a console and the parents put it in her brother&#x27;s room for them to &quot;share&quot;) and there weren&#x27;t any mandatory programming classes, so they just were never exposed to it as an option, even though they are both highly logical people (thus the chem or bio degree paths before switching).<p>So I guess I&#x27;m still firmly in the &quot;Its a pipeline problem&quot; camp. Until we account for cases like the ones above, tech is going to lose out on some talented women, and some of those women will miss out on tech. I think mandatory high school programming and networking classes are what will really help.