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).
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).