(Tagging @dflo so she sees this)
Warning: long comment ahead (because there’s a lot to unpack here!). I’ll link to a couple of sources here, since you asked, @neoxian.
The underlying problem that you’re coming up against is akin to the debates we have all the time about underrepresentation among minorities in positions of power. For instance, I grew up in a city that is nearly 50% Latinx and over 8% black, but our public university (UCLA) is only slightly above 20% Latinx and 5% black, and that’s despite scholarships and other programs designed to recruit minority students. Why are rates of incarceration and poverty still so much higher among African Americans, who make up 34% of our prison population? We can see the numbers very clearly, and (I hope) we can all agree that black people and Latinx people aren’t just inherently born with a lack of motivation to succeed, and numbers like that aren’t coincidence.
Now, to focus it more on some of my theories about underrepresentation on Steemit, particularly among witnesses. It could have to do with the severe underrepresentation of women in tech in general. There is requisite technical knowledge that people have to have to be witnesses, and women are underrepresented in those fields. But still, the percentage of witnesses is much lower than the percentages of women in tech in general. Why is that?
I’ll draw on direct experience. This post was responding to two different articles I read on here that made literally hundreds of dollars, in which a significant chunk of both articles were expressing extreme resentment toward women on this platform, for reasons which I think I’ve adequately refuted with numbers (or at least set a solid foundation to refute). In response to those articles, there were many comments congratulating or endorsing those views, as if the upvotes aren’t enough to express how widely that article was approved of in this community. When I commented back, I personally was objectified and asked to show pictures to evaluate my “hotness” (see my screenshot above)—no efforts made to actually engage with or respond to my comment. When women read articles that are that hateful toward us and see them rewarded like that, and comments by women are dismissed, it sends a clear message that women are unwelcome and not respected intellectually. Something tells me that the man who wrote that article (who clearly has a lot of power on this site), and all of those people approving of that article, are not prone to vote for female witnesses, if their sexism is really so ingrained that they're completely overlooking how toxic and harmful their behavior is toward women.
As for the wider problem of women in tech, I can speak from life experience. I was a computer nerd as a kid. As a 10 year old, in the infancy of the internet, I was at home taking apart and putting computers back together. I taught myself how to code as a middle schooler. Some of the things I was exposed to as a female child were just… awful. I had to hide my gender to avoid harassment. I dropped computer programming in 9th grade. As a 25 year old, I worked in a computer repair shop for a brief period of time, and the sexual harassment I faced was just ridiculous. My supervisor asked to put my period on the calendar so he could schedule himself around me. It was a joke, but it was a really hurtful and embarrassing one. Customers would constantly express surprise to learn that I was in fact not the receptionist, and would ask to speak to a real technician. I started feeling extremely depressed and constantly kicked down, so I left the job after 6 months.
I do hope you’ll keep an open mind to these points and consider them, as I have genuinely considered yours.