NixOS is a pretty technical distro and a large part of the community is technically minded people. Almost all really technically minded groups I can think of in my surroundings, be it work, associations or collectives, have similar problems and to me it feels like a bigger societal issue that society fails to give all people the same opportunities and chances to get into technical things which propagated into our community. That’s why it is so hard to fix this because the problem itself is gigantic and pretty much everywhere.
But it feels like in the last years diversity grows which also propagates into nix. There are just so many things to do everywhere and you don’t even know where to start.
Also in a more specific note: I feel like beginners especially not male identifying ones often compare themselves to the person that know nix/nixos best around them which is obviously a bad comparison which is not encouraging. Also they often don’t find the courage to ask people around them how to tackle, solve and break down a scary looking big task into smaller steps which are easier to solve and what’s the thought process behind it. I think it is always important, if time allows it, to give people the steps so that they can learn how to solve things on their own and are not reliant on others to help them craft a line of nix code.