State of Js

I drafted up this blog a year ago but never published it.

“State of JS” do an annual survey about Javascript, and one of the questions was about people’s favourite content authors.

In the 2021 survey, 2 out of 15 of these content authors were women, and some of the “Social Justice Warriors” aren’t happy about this, so one of them stated that the chart’s title should be simply “MEN”. Then she follows it up with highlighting the demographics of the people surveyed. 71.3% were men, 4% women, 0.9% non-binary, and everyone else refused to answer.

I think her point is that men are voting for men and thus perpetuating the “bro culture” that is holding back women like her.

If we assume that the survey does represent the proportion of developers (after-all, it is well known that the software development industry is mostly men), then I would say that should be proportionate to the number of public content creators too.

Therefore, we should only really expect to see 4% of women occupy the Top 15 Content Creators list. So what is 4% of 15? Isn’t it 0.6? So really, it’s not even that farfetched to expect all 15 to be Men.

It’s possible there are more women since there’s that large number of people who opted not to specify. However, around 492 women did respond, so there could easily be more women on that list. What’s that you say? Women are probably nominating men?! Unheard of!

I only learned some Web Development stuff HTML, Javascript, Typescript, React over a short period, and if you asked me to name some creators, I’d have probably named Dan Abramov, Wes Bos, Florin Pop, and Stefan Baumgartner and Cory House. Kent C. Dodds, Dan Abramov are big names in the field and the likes of Wes Bos have a huge following, have paid content, are very active on Twitter, and have a Podcast. So you expect these names to occupy the top spots of a list like this. Is it really perpetuating an exclusive culture?

I think it is just simple statistics. There’s no point lambasting StateOfJs for putting a survey out there. There’s no point attacking the men who responded that they didn’t vote for your friends.

I’ve written about a few occurrences like this. Deep down, these people think they are doing good by going on the offensive and “virtue signalling”, but all they are doing is creating a divide/toxic culture which is the opposite of what they actually want.

Note: It looks like there are 5 women on the latest survey https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/resources/. I wonder if this is linked to last year’s outrage, or mere coincidence.