Great question. It's more of a workplace concern, as I'm sure that nonbinary folks experience these issues in other workplaces. However, software development is definitely a male dominated environment and there's a lot of discussion in the industry about how we make that environment more inviting to women.

So there's a shared experience there of being a gender minority within software, but also the difference that some of our concerns are very different than women's concerns.

And software rules our world. My company lets me declare my pronouns on the internal org chart tool (yay!) but required me to select man or woman to receive health benefits (boo!). As an engineer, I can help inform system design and provide feedback on the software that gets written to handle cases like these, which makes our software better.

Most professional software development is about working with a local (your team/the people you directly collaborate with) and global (your stack’s ecosystem) community as much as it is about writing code, so it stands to reason that a high visibility social characteristic like gender identity might affect other aspects of the professional experience.

Case in point, demographic information like gender identity is a useful feature to contextualize or find patterns in the data — like how the blog post points out that more than half of respondents wrote their first line of code before age 16, but that this statistic varies by gender and country.

If it really doesn’t matter, it will be borne out in the statistics (i.e. the gender identity feature will give you no additional information).

Sometimes software developers are humans.

It was in the survey results.. the actual topic of this post.