I keep on seeing these takes that have a strong "but what about the female devs who were left off the paper" vibe. And I haven't checked but things are so bad in that space that there may literally be no one to leave off the paper. So yeah. Things are bad.

None of that get's us anywhere near what happened after people noticed that things are bad. That is a whole other shit show and I have no idea how they unring that bell.

The "why" of "why were there 26 men and no women on that paper?" is important, which is why I bring it up. The "why" of the rest of it is definitely not. There was real damage done to people and we will see how it washes up but probably a lot of hard-won community trust is lost.

Anyway. The big issue here is so important. And so widespread. And it should not forgotten in the specific (and still very important) numpty story. Even communities with real, active, and effective diversity drives like the R community (RLadies is amazing!) have this problem

The R Core still has zero women on it. The contributors webpage lists at least one woman, but it might not list two (I'm loathe to guess gender from a list of names of people I don't know) https://www.r-project.org/contributors.html

This isn't a secret problem. People really want to fix it. But the fixes are unclear and hard. But it's probably the most pressing problem in open source scientific software development.

(Stan, which is the thing I contribute to, has two female devs. Out of over 50 devs past and future, this should not be thought of as being structurally better than having none. Let's wait for the % to hit double digits before we upgrade ourselves from abysmal.)

Anyway. I need to finish the thing I'm doing and then go to bed. So I shall retire from my self-appointed job as the person who points out that the big terrible awful horror thing that is happening right now is a bubble of exploding swamp gas from the even bigger disaster below.