probably much of what makes rationalists so male is that rationalism selects for abilities/interests related to programming, which is itself very male-skewed
This is just pushing the question one step back though, I don’t know of any good theories for why software engineering is heavily biased towards males either.
The point is just that factor analysis assumes that the items/variables end up correlating due to the factors. If you put variables that are upstream of the factors, such as sex, into the factor analysis, then those upstream variables would have no reason to correlate with each other in ways that match the factor structure (and in fact due to collider bias, would in this case have reasons to end up correlated in ways that precisely oppose the factor structure), so therefore it would be nicer to avoid demographic variables as much as possible.
This is just pushing the question one step back though, I don’t know of any good theories for why software engineering is heavily biased towards males either.
The point is just that factor analysis assumes that the items/variables end up correlating due to the factors. If you put variables that are upstream of the factors, such as sex, into the factor analysis, then those upstream variables would have no reason to correlate with each other in ways that match the factor structure (and in fact due to collider bias, would in this case have reasons to end up correlated in ways that precisely oppose the factor structure), so therefore it would be nicer to avoid demographic variables as much as possible.