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posted by on Monday February 15 2016, @06:11AM   Printer-friendly
from the pull-the-good-stuff dept.

A study of pull requests made by nearly 1.4 million users of Github has found that code changes made by women were more likely to get accepted, unless their gender was easily identifiable. The study is awaiting peer review, so keep that in mind:

The researchers, from the computer science departments at Caly Poly and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day - 1 April 2015. Github is an enormous developer community which does not request gender information from its 12 million users. However the team was able to identify whether roughly 1.4m were male or female - either because it was clear from the users' profiles or because their email addresses could be matched with the Google+ social network. The researchers accepted that this was a privacy risk but said they did not intend to publish the raw data.

The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men. The researchers considered various factors, such as whether women were more likely to be responding to known issues, whether their contributions were shorter in length and so easier to appraise, and which programming language they were using, but they could not find a correlation.

However among users who were not well known within the community, those whose profiles made clear that they were women had a much lower acceptance rate than those whose gender was not obvious. "For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women's acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong," the paper noted.

"Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they're outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men. Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless," the researchers concluded.

[Continues...]

The excellent Slate Star Codex has analysed this data.

I would highly recommend reading Scott Alexander's full analysis, but here's his summation...

So, let’s review. A non-peer-reviewed paper shows that women get more requests accepted than men. In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage. When gender is unblinded, both men and women do worse; it’s unclear if there are statistically significant differences in this regard.Only one of the study’s subgroups showed lower acceptance for women than men, and the size of the difference was 63% vs. 64%, which may or may not be statistically significant. This may or may not be related to the fact, demonstrated in the study, that women propose bigger and less useful changes on average; no attempt was made to control for this. This tiny amount of discrimination against women seems to be mostly from other women, not from men.

The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.

Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:41AM (#304495)

    I defected to Soylentnews to avoid gender war articles. Please let's not devolve Soylentnews into the same.

    • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Monday February 15 2016, @08:08AM

      by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Monday February 15 2016, @08:08AM (#304512) Homepage Journal

      Fuck this article. Mod article -5 Troll and -5 Spam and -5 flaimbate. I haven't been paying attention to who keeps posting this men vs women coding bullshit. Take this trend and stick in in your ass, fuck you Takyon. I don't give a shit, and I hope to God the majority of soylentils feel the same.

      Enough is enough, are you trying to ruin this place? Trying to turn it into a sjw flamefest. Fuck you Takyon. This is the last female male in computer science article I will respond to. Fuck anyone that posts more of this bullshit.

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      • (Score: 2, Troll) by takyon on Monday February 15 2016, @08:27AM

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday February 15 2016, @08:27AM (#304517) Journal

        If a BBC article reporting on a study gets you that triggered then you may have a problem.

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        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 15 2016, @08:44AM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 15 2016, @08:44AM (#304522) Journal

          Actually, the people doing the "study" have the problem. People need to own their problems. There is no Github problem cited here. Nor is it a guy problem. I don't think it is a woman problem either. The problem belongs to those people who expect this thing called "gender equality". Those people have multiple problems. "Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall," Do you see what they've done there? They have judged males and females, and deem women to be superior to males. There is no "gender equality" here, they are struggling to place women above men.

          Github has a problem. That problem is, that they have permitted an outside interest to take over Github, and said outside interest is far more concerned with "feminism" than it is concerned with coding.

          And, we, the general public, as well as all individuals using Github, have a different problem, in that the quality of Github will deteriorate.

          If my primary concern with Github were that my work was accepted, then I would do what is necessary to get my work accepted. If I felt that Github were biased against my work because I am Chinese, or Korean, or Tutsi, or Polish, or whatever, I would use some neutral name that did not identify me as such. Many women have done the same.

          But - oh wait! The authors of this article purport to know which submitters are male, and which female? How do they KNOW?!?!?! Have they arbitrarily assigned all the best code on Github to female authors, and all the trash to males?

          Peer reviewed, right? I want to know how they controlled for gender in their "study".

          Biased individuals almost never do unbiased studies, and they cannot come up with unbiased results.

          Never trust the results of any study done by Social Justice Warriors.

          I, for one, resent very much being socially engineered.

          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 15 2016, @08:52AM

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday February 15 2016, @08:52AM (#304525) Journal

            Even though you resent being socially engineered, you were able to write a mature response to the article. That's more than we can say about commenters screaming "flamebait!!!!111" on a story being reported by BBC, Ars, The Register, CNN, The Guardian, CBS, MIT Technology Review, and others.

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            • (Score: 4, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 15 2016, @09:29AM

              by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 15 2016, @09:29AM (#304530) Journal

              Well, actually, I do regard it as flamebait. Women are being told - they are being conditioned - to see rather normal gender interactions as "oppression".

              Even when we don't know each other's genders, religions, racial makeup, there is a competitive atmosphere in a lot of our relations. You see it all over the internet - github, twitter, facebook, you name it. Hell, you see it right here on Soylent. It's obvious as hell in academia - colleges try to promote an image of being elite. MIT is better than any other college in some fields - but are they really, or is that just the image they have managed to promote?

              Competitiveness. We all want to be "the best", after all.

              Traditionally, women didn't waste a lot of time competing with men. Today, they have begun to compete. If they are good, they will prove themselvs. If they aren't so good, then they won't prove themselves, will they?

              It is completely unreasonable to believe that men are going to "change" for women. How many damned fool women have married worthless bums, believing that the bum would change?

              Let's be reasonable. I'm an asshole, and I'm not going to change just because some little piece of fluff says I should be "nicer". It didn't happen ten thousand years ago, it didn't happen a generation ago, and it's not happening today. I'm an asshole - deal with it, or GTFO - don't expect an apology.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:36AM

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:36AM (#304532)

              screaming "flamebait!!!!111" on a story being reported by BBC, Ars, The Register, CNN, The Guardian, CBS, MIT Technology Review, and others.

              Wow, media outlets that are quickly becoming irrelevant because of dying business models are reporting on a story that is guaranteed to get them a lot of clicks. Who'd have thunk?!

              • (Score: 2) by takyon on Monday February 15 2016, @09:54AM

                by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Monday February 15 2016, @09:54AM (#304535) Journal

                It's still not flamebait because of the content, which is a widely-reported study. It's entirely possible to discuss the validity of the study without flaming.

                Let's say the study survives peer review and gets reported on again, or the results are replicated by other researchers. Will you still consider it clickbait or flamebait?

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                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @10:25AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @10:25AM (#304547)

                  yes. it is what it is. and its brainwashing propaganda. the answer is yes. and im with the people above, when they redo the study please dont post it.

                • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @10:43AM

                  by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @10:43AM (#304553)

                  I did my own study. I found that systemd really is an excellent piece of software, but only because Lennart Poettering has a vagina *and* testicles! Another test I did which you might find enlightening... I also did a DNA test on him and found out not only is he half man half woman he's half black, half mexican, half native american, half muslim, half calf, half vente and half a sack of shit! His code makes even the most anal retentive Social Justice Warrior ponder 24/7/365 about what they could possibly bitch about.

                • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anal Pumpernickel on Monday February 15 2016, @11:16AM

                  by Anal Pumpernickel (776) on Monday February 15 2016, @11:16AM (#304562)

                  The problem is that fools start citing these studies as a sort of proof even if the quality of the research is shoddy (as you can expect from the social sciences), it hasn't been peer-reviewed, and it hasn't been replicated.

                  I don't think it's flamebait, but I also don't think it's very smart for idiotic reporters to instantly cite studies simply because they exist and are new, no matter what conclusions they reach. It's especially bad in situations where they use the studies to justify changes to government policy.

            • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 15 2016, @11:21AM

              by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 15 2016, @11:21AM (#304565) Journal

              This from my educated son - the one who really understands math, science, statistical analysis, and much more:

              It is pretty obvious that the authors set out to show social injustice, and after coming up empty five times they found a point they might argue. At best it's a stretch to write another grant proposal.

              Sociology and its retrospective surveys are mostly garbage in my opinion. With any luck the peer that reviews this will look at it thoroughly and critically and challenge it on numerous counts.

              I fucking hate sociology. It isn't a science. It is no more than a collection of interesting "trends" and viewpoints. The foundations of sound science inherently differ from sociology.

              • (Score: 1) by Nelson on Monday February 15 2016, @10:39PM

                by Nelson (5393) on Monday February 15 2016, @10:39PM (#304916)

                Point of question: Did they set out to show social injustice or did they set out to try and quantify some aspect of it? How do you know what their intent was or is this simply inferred by their past?

                The reactions here, merely to the study are kind of shocking. We could simply ignore it if it's invalid or wait for it to be peer reviewed or something. Seems a lot of folks feel pretty insecure at the very suggestion that there are actual gender issues in tech; which is funny because its grossly obvious that there are some differences.

                What's his argument against the actual numbers they've published? Why aren't they the same or are they within error?

                • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday February 16 2016, @12:49AM

                  by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday February 16 2016, @12:49AM (#304987) Journal

                  The woman who commissioned this "study" has a history of Social Justice activism. When a person has a history of political and/or social activism, it may safely be presumed that person has an agenda when he/she commissions a "study" in that area of interest.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Monday February 15 2016, @02:33PM

            by SanityCheck (5190) on Monday February 15 2016, @02:33PM (#304653)

            I resent this article as well.

            Even assuming they did get the genders right, there is a huge disconnect between what the study measured and what it is supposed to mean. I don't see them saying what the connection is... A pull request could have nothing more than updated comments. If a woman wants to spend her days rewriting comments, hell I'll accept the pull request... So how does that mean women write 'better' code? It could just mean they write better comments... Also if the pull request is short and easy to look over it might get accepted right away, if the pull request is huge it might get rejected and told to come back in pieces that are easier to review... So it such a case maybe women tend to write smaller or more concise pull requests. Does that mean they are better? I don't know...

            Also how can SJWs support this, I thought their latest shtick was that there is no gender binary...

            Well let's say we can somehow take this stupid study at face value (*laughs to self*), does this mean we should now pay female engineers more? (At this point I cant contain the laughter so I need to stop).

        • (Score: 1, Flamebait) by aristarchus on Monday February 15 2016, @09:18AM

          by aristarchus (2645) on Monday February 15 2016, @09:18AM (#304529) Journal

          You haven't yet seem me triggered, but I have to agree that this is just more salve for the Sad Puppies. Poor bastards. If better coders identify as female, they are better coders. If better coders do not identify as female, they still are better coders. If fail to see a problem, unless it is that we need some kind of discriminatory "affirmative action" program for the poor sad puppies that cannot compete on merits, because after hundreds of years of white privilege, they do not actually know how to excel in a truly competitive environment. I am all in favor of adding "single white loser male" to the affirmative action categories. Maybe even "heterosexual, Christian White Male", but that seems to be pushing it a bit, because _those bastards_ will not succeed even if we give them a leg up to replace that they have historically cut from beneath others.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 15 2016, @10:21AM

            by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 15 2016, @10:21AM (#304545) Journal

            ROFLMAO - that is just to damned funny. Sounds to me like you don't have a leg to stand on.

      • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 15 2016, @09:05AM

        by maxwell demon (1608) on Monday February 15 2016, @09:05AM (#304527) Journal

        Maybe SN could get a separate Gender section (nexus) that people can then set to ignored.

        --
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      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Monday February 15 2016, @11:24AM

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday February 15 2016, @11:24AM (#304566) Homepage Journal

        What sort of articles would you like to see?

        Perhaps if you submitted articles that interest you and that you wish to discuss, you could ignore those in which you are uninterested.

        It's not really very hard to submit an article either.

        Just go to this link: https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl [soylentnews.org] and enter some explanatory info and a link to the article. Then we'll do the rest.

        If you'd like more information about submission guidelines, you can find that here: https://soylentnews.org/faq.pl?op=editorial [soylentnews.org]

        I'd be happy to help you if you are having problems with the submission process.

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    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @08:50AM

      by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 15 2016, @08:50AM (#304523) Journal

      Easy solution: Don't read it!

      I think Soylentnews could improve by
      - Adding option to mod articles up or down (to give some easily digestible feedback to the editors), assigning a score to articles.
      - Adding tags to articles (in this case "gender" and maybe "politics")
      - Adding a scoring option for users to increase/reduce personal article scores based on tags
      - Provide article threshold based on afore-mentioned scoring

      Basically, a filter similar to the slrn kill file. I don't mind this article, and don't see why it should be skipped just because some other users are not interested.

      The scheme could be further improved by
      - Aging (article starts with a certain score, but scores are reduced at a fixed rate)
      - Sorting articles on main-page by scores rather than age

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      • (Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @12:09PM

        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 15 2016, @12:09PM (#304583) Homepage Journal

        Sounds awesome. When will you be submitting the pull request?

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 4, Funny) by Vanderhoth on Monday February 15 2016, @12:17PM

          by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday February 15 2016, @12:17PM (#304588)

          Right after they provide proof of their women or minority status. There are quotas to meet you know.

          (Yes I'll take the troll flambe for this comment, I couldn't resist the joke and I deserve the punishment)

          --
          "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
          • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @01:40PM

            by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 15 2016, @01:40PM (#304626) Journal

            SoylentBob suggests to have a "funny -1" to rate bad jokes ;-)

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            • (Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday February 15 2016, @02:30PM

              by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday February 15 2016, @02:30PM (#304652)

              I would accept that. It just seemed so inappropriately appropriate.

              --
              "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
        • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @02:05PM

          by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 15 2016, @02:05PM (#304640) Journal

          Would love to, but just read that my pull request has only little chance of being accepted :-(

          Seriously: My perl-fu is a bit rusty and I don't have much inside into the slash code-base yet. Last time I touched it was in context of the sarcasm tags, and iirc it was more or less re-implemented instead of pulled from my request. Other than that, I didn't use perl much for ~8 years, and perl is not really that intuitive kind of language that sticks once learned. I could give it a try though, but I would hate to invest time and later hear that the idea is generally considered crappy and I'm the only one interested anyway. I have enough hobby-projects to waste my time, so it should have a chance for success for me to start on it...

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          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @04:10PM

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 15 2016, @04:10PM (#304706) Homepage Journal

            Just messing with you.

            Tags could be relatively easy and doable without resorting to ajax even.

            Not sure I dig up/down-voting stories. The eds generally get the gist of if everyone dug a story or not already and nobody else would benefit by giving an article a score.

            Adjusting an article's display by user-selected tag values, my first thoughts are it would be a tad complex and would pretty much eliminate any benefit we get from varnish caching for logged in users. My second thought tells me that logged in users almost never get varnish cached pages anyway. What do you think the benefit would be vs say being able to adjust what's displayed by topic? Cause I can see both up and down sides, neither of which would be reflected in the site feeds.

            Threshold opinions rolled into prior response.

            Aging and displaying by score? What are we, Digg or Reddit or something? I personally always hated displaying stories like that because good new stuff has to wait until enough people dig through the basement and decide it's worth reading before most people even see it. As often as someone bitches that they saw "blah" over on /. first already, this strikes me as a really bad idea.

            All of the above aside, this is all easily doable with the API if someone wanted to write a new front end for the site that Reddited us up. You'd only need a small db to store tags/scores; probably get away with sqlite or Berkeley db even.

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            • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @05:38PM

              by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 15 2016, @05:38PM (#304779) Journal

              Not sure I dig up/down-voting stories. The eds generally get the gist of if everyone dug a story or not already and nobody else would benefit by giving an article a score.

              My idea is that the article score visible to the user is the public score plus applied values from tag-scores. This means, if an article was voted up by users, it will stay on top longer. If an article was voted down, it will disappear faster. Due to the ageing, all articles will disappear eventually. By playing with the algorithms/starting scores it could be ensured that only exceptionally well rated articles really stay on the top, but moderately well rated articles still stay on the main page considerably longer.

              Aging and displaying by score? What are we, Digg or Reddit or something? I personally always hated displaying stories like that because good new stuff has to wait until enough people dig through the basement and decide it's worth reading before most people even see it.

              As mentioned above, by playing with the algorithms (e.g. exponential decline of "newness" points) it could be guaranteed that the top is always occupied by the 2-3 newest articles.

              But maybe it would be better / less disruptive to offer the same feature in another box on the right side, similar to "Most Recent Journal Entries" and "Hot Comments". If only few people use it, it can stay there and no harm done. If more people like it, a poll might be considered to swap the sorting of this side box and main view. By then we would also have some statistics and experience how well new stories fare in this scheme.

              BTW: Maybe it would be possible to use the existing topics / add more of them instead of additional tags. Is there any way to subscribe to certain topics already? (I didn't find such an option in my user settings)

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              • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 15 2016, @06:17PM

                by bob_super (1357) on Monday February 15 2016, @06:17PM (#304794)

                > My idea is that the article score visible to the user is the public score plus applied values from tag-scores.
                > This means, if an article was voted up by users, it will stay on top longer. If an article was voted down, it will disappear faster.

                When I suggested it a few days ago, I meant absolutely no functional impact at all.
                Like a post: give the author a nod with a +1 interesting.
                Hate that someone went full flamebait: rate it as such.
                People scrolling through can use the score as another indication of quality... like for regular posts. Sometimes great articles only get 3 comments, while getting 86 comments may be unrelated to the quality of the post itself.

                The only difference between a regular post and a story could be extending the score's range to a more granular +/-5, or 10... but that'd be more coding work for TMB...

                • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @11:21PM

                  by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 15 2016, @11:21PM (#304934) Homepage Journal

                  I'm not really askeert of a bit of coding, I'm mostly questioning the utility at this point. Now as suggested above, putting stories ranked by users over in a slashbox to the side that users can turn on and off... that's a lot more useful and doable.

                  --
                  My rights don't end where your fear begins.
              • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @11:24PM

                by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday February 15 2016, @11:24PM (#304939) Homepage Journal

                See below [soylentnews.org]. Also, no, you can't filter by topics. You can however filter by nexus. Which is why I'd like to migrate existing topics to their own nexus each.

                --
                My rights don't end where your fear begins.
    • (Score: 2) by Jiro on Monday February 15 2016, @05:07PM

      by Jiro (3176) on Monday February 15 2016, @05:07PM (#304750)

      It actually links to a decent and fairly comprehensive rebuttal. Slashdot would never do that.

  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by TGV on Monday February 15 2016, @06:52AM

    by TGV (2838) on Monday February 15 2016, @06:52AM (#304498)

    Statistical conclusions in the article are faulty: the significance is based on a chi square with enormously high dfs, as high as 3,064,667. Any difference is significant with a df that high, even though the differences are minute (14% vs 14.5%, really?). The researchers should think if their model that the underlying data truly only represents a difference in gender and all other possible variables are identical is true.

    A large part of the article focuses on arguments like "they feel dejected" while in reality the numbers hardly differ. Not only that, they are in the women's favor, even on the first request. How can you then speak about feelings of dejection or abandoning because of "an unreasonably aggressive argument style" (as if women are by definition incapable of that)? No, it's just clutching at straws because they have to write an article.

    But it's the final graph that is the nail in the coffin of this article: even with their self-chosen statistics, there is no difference in acceptance rate for men and women when gender is known (although "known" is too strong a word), not even in the outsider category. To get to some form of political conclusion, they then phrase it like this: "There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong" while not having even the cheapest statistical argument to support it. That's the best they can come up.

    So the conclusion of this article should be: women have a slight advantage in pull requests on github. The rest is FUD.

    • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bradley13 on Monday February 15 2016, @07:27AM

      by bradley13 (3053) on Monday February 15 2016, @07:27AM (#304505) Homepage Journal

      I agree with the comments above: the authors clearly start with their desired conclusions, and then torture the data into supporting those conclusions. Even then, they are not actually successful.

      I would also like to point out another aspect: This recent practice of publicizing articles that have not yet been accepted for publication - this is despicable science. If the reviewers know anything about statistics, this paper will have to be massively revised before publication. Indeed, it may well have to conclude the opposite of what the authors want, namely, that the analysis shows that there is no gender bias at all.

      --
      Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by TGV on Monday February 15 2016, @08:07AM

        by TGV (2838) on Monday February 15 2016, @08:07AM (#304511)

        > If the reviewers know anything about statistics

        That's a big assumption. Most researchers know just enough about statistics to be dangerous. The problems of Fisher/Neyman significance testing are abundantly clear, the H0 phallacy is well-known since the 1960s, but in social sciences, the researchers just continue using them in order to get positive conclusions. And then we don't even discuss the methodological errors and wrong use of statistical tools (all correlations between 200 items of a questionnaire, etc).

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Vanderhoth on Monday February 15 2016, @12:35PM

        by Vanderhoth (61) on Monday February 15 2016, @12:35PM (#304597)

        Depends on who you mean by "reviewers", if you read the study at the top of each page it says, "not peer-reviewed", in big bold letters. So the only reviewers of this study are the journalists writing about it. Yes the author screwed up, they had a conclusion and went about finding data to support that. To me it doesn't even look like they did a good job. It's like they found the opposite, then stated the conclusion anyway and cut out anything that might have brought that conclusion in to SERIOUS consideration.

        The journalist though. They looked at this and saw a beautiful opportunity for clickbait even if there were serious errors. Although, I'm not sure if it's they didn't understand it or if they did, but pushed it anyway. Journalists normally aren't math people. Most of the time they're just writers who write about A LOT of different topics and have at best an entry level understanding of what it is they're reporting on. So they go to the first simplest source that supports what they want to write and use that to spin an article.

        I'm a little P.O'ed at takyon for submitting this garbage and at the editors for letting it through because they're giving the journalist exactly what they want, clicks. Positive re-enforcement to keep lying, misrepresenting facts, and pushing agendas by giving attention to obviously shitty studies and producing shitty clickbait. Which in turn leads researchers to continue producing shitty studies because they KNOW they'll get attention if their claims are outlandish enough, which will bring them notoriety and funding to keep "researching" ideologically driven issues. Poorly, I might add.

        --
        "Now we know", "And knowing is half the battle". -G.I. Joooooe
    • (Score: 2) by shrewdsheep on Monday February 15 2016, @12:01PM

      by shrewdsheep (5215) on Monday February 15 2016, @12:01PM (#304579)

      TLDR

      Statistical conclusions in the article are faulty: the significance is based on a chi square with enormously high dfs, as high as 3,064,667. Any difference is significant with a df that high, even though the differences are minute (14% vs 14.5%, really?).

      It is the other way round. High degrees of freedom (df) make it more difficult to reject the null hypothesis (the tail become much more heavy) as compared to a test with lower df. Increasing *sample size* will ultimately allow to prove even the tiniest difference. A reasonable approach that is followed sometimes (and I thought is prevalent in sociology, but maybe not) to test whether differences (frequency differences in this case) exceed a threshold of minimal relevance.

      The researchers should think if their model that the underlying data truly only represents a difference in gender and all other possible variables are identical is true.

      To me, this would be the critical point. Studies like this are full of confounding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confounding) and proper control thereof seems nigh impossible in this case.

      • (Score: 2) by TGV on Monday February 15 2016, @07:22PM

        by TGV (2838) on Monday February 15 2016, @07:22PM (#304825)

        You're right, it *is* the other way around. df = 1, n is 3M.

  • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Monday February 15 2016, @07:10AM

    by jmorris (4844) on Monday February 15 2016, @07:10AM (#304502)

    I'd say their choice of April Fools day was somehow appropriate since this study is a joke. And there are those who can't understand why so many folks distrust Scientism. Police yer ranks guys or STFU when the budget hammer sees science as fertile ground to cut waste, fraud and abuse.

  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @07:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @07:33AM (#304506)

    inb4 500 comments about men vs women

  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @07:48AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Monday February 15 2016, @07:48AM (#304509) Journal

    "For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women's acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong," the paper noted.

    This shows a general bias against those disclosing their gender, because *gender does not matter to developers*. Those disclosing their gender are more likely to have a related agenda and might get rejected because of this agenda.

    For the main finding

    The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men.

    This leaves some room for interpretation. Conform to the cliché would be that women are better at communication and therefore can better argue for their contributions. I would suspect however that women without gender-agenda are still less likely to pursue a career or hobby as programmer, and therefore those who really make it are filtered more strongly. Probably these programmers are on average better than the average of the less filtered male contributors.

    --
    Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Monday February 15 2016, @08:29AM

      by dyingtolive (952) on Monday February 15 2016, @08:29AM (#304518)

      Well, the one woman (of three respiring meatbags) that I work with sometimes stresses out because she's afraid people don't take her seriously. I used to argue with that insecurity, and try to build her up, because she does a damn fine job, but nowadays I'll tell her it's "because she's a gurrrrl!" and stick my toungue out like some stupid eight year old, because I've not evolved much beyond that. I got a smile out of that once inbetween the tears I saw before. But the thing is, everyone actually does take her seriously, moreso than they take me seriously, and for good and aforementioned reason. Our product manager referred to me as the best programmer on our (QA) team. He's probably right. But she's the best person for the JOB, because it's more than just "write a tool to test x", which ties into your latter comment about that cliche.

      At the same time, I think nothing pertaining to racial or gender identity should be disclosed with regard to anything programming unless unavoidable (like in meatspace), because it DOESN'T APPLY TO WHAT YOU ARE DOING. FULL STOP. If you identify as x, where x is any quality unrelated to the project, it should never have come up to begin with, becuase it's not related to the topic and should have been shut down at the first possible moment. I don't care if you're white, black, gay, straight, whatever. I care about how much you're fucking up the project, or how much you're leaving me in the dust. Everything else is offtopic and best suited for chat over lunch or at the bar after work.

      I don't honestly care who I'm talking to so long as it's the person who can fix problems the fastest out of anyone that I can get in touch with. Some people feel otherwise. Some people are just bad people. Those groups probably have some overlap, but not as much as some people would like all people to think. Or not. I... don't know how to end this drunken rant that I think stopped having anything to do with what you said some words ago.

      --
      Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
      • (Score: 4, Funny) by dyingtolive on Monday February 15 2016, @08:38AM

        by dyingtolive (952) on Monday February 15 2016, @08:38AM (#304520)

        I had 50 karma and that only got a score of 1.

        Sidestepping what it deserves, one way or the other, posting again to see what the new comment reflects.

        --
        Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @08:40AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @08:40AM (#304521)

          You probably checked the no karma bonus box on accident, or forgot to uncheck it.

      • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday February 15 2016, @09:02AM

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Monday February 15 2016, @09:02AM (#304526) Journal

        I dunno about your karma - but I just hit a +1 on your comment. (+1 thisguyain'tbraindead)

        I said pretty much the same before I scrolled down this far. If a person feels that they are a member of a group which is not taken seriously, then that person doesn't need to identify with that group in every submission on the internet. Me, I'm comfortable with myself - I don't care that people know my gender, my racial background, my educational background, my professional background. I'm just so damned good, it simply doesn't bother me that people crack Pollock jokes at my expense, or whatever.

        If I were sensitive about being Nigerian, then I wouldn't tell people that I'm Nigerian. (hey, it's embarrasing that half the people from Nigeria are royalty, and I'm not royal, alright?) Problem solved - you can't see my genetic background printed out in a sidebar on your computer.

        Crap, when I'm involved in some project, I even forget that I'm really Nigerian, I don't expect you to remember it!

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @02:37PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @02:37PM (#304655)

      > I would suspect however that women without gender-agenda are still less likely to pursue a career or hobby as programmer,

      What an utterly ridiculous, self-serving "suspicion."

    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 15 2016, @03:07PM

      by Thexalon (636) on Monday February 15 2016, @03:07PM (#304675)

      The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men.

      This leaves some room for interpretation. Conform to the cliché would be that women are better at communication and therefore can better argue for their contributions. I would suspect however that women without gender-agenda are still less likely to pursue a career or hobby as programmer, and therefore those who really make it are filtered more strongly. Probably these programmers are on average better than the average of the less filtered male contributors.

      Or, there's also door number 3: The difference of 4% is quite possibly not statistically significant enough to draw any useful conclusions about it.

      The interesting stat is that unmasked is lower than masked, regardless of gender. That suggests that either:
      1. People who make frequent patches to a project are less careful than people who are trying to add one specific feature or fix one specific bug.
      2. People making the sorts of personal appeals that would lead to gender unmasking are not the best programmers.

      As far as whether Github has anti-female discrimination, I'm honestly not sure, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were. There is definitely, in my experience, gender discrimination in the tech field. I'm a guy, so some of this is second-hand knowledge, but it's second-hand knowledge from women I have every reason to trust about this. And bear in mind that all of this is in the 21st century:
      - Every single one of my female college classmates the CS department experienced sexual harassment by their fellow students in the CS facilities. And no, we're not talking about "Would you like to meet up for some coffee some time?" or looks that make women uncomfortable, we're talking about viewing pornography and requesting that women show their breasts in an area of the school that was supposed to be an educational space. All but 1 switched from CS to a math major to get away from it - the math department had no such problems, even with a majority-male faculty and majority-male students.
      - When I was working in a big corporate environment, for the first few years I was there only 5 women were in my 40-person tech department and none of them were hired to be programmers (2 in QA, 2 sysadmins, 1 manager who didn't code herself). And that wasn't due to a lack of qualified applicants, as we found out when we got a new CTO in and we picked up 3 very good female programmers in short order. Before that, women with tech backgrounds were being pushed into project management instead of coding.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:33PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:33PM (#304803)

        Every single one of my female college classmates the CS department experienced sexual harassment by their fellow students in the CS facilities.

        Every guy faces the same sort of sexual harassment, but because we're been derided our whole lives as "virgin neckbeard losers" we just shrug it off and keep doing what we love. The women, on the other hand demand special consideration and attention for this bullying. Which is bullshit. Go to an all-girl school and see just how evil young women and girls can be. My fiancée has horror stories. Women are vindictive as fuck, and they're just playing the same emotional appeal game they always do, but the people who cave to "poor wittle wyminz in STEM" are actually destroying Mozilla, Twitter, Microsoft, and a plethora of other tech companies. Github is next.

        If women are more susceptible to their own emotions, I don't care. They are responsible for their own minds. If women aren't more susceptible to their own emotions, then you have to realize that men must be more susceptible to the emotional appeals of women. Otherwise TFA wouldn't exist. This is how we are wired, and why we should ignore the emotional appeals.

        Just Shut Up and Code. Sadly, we can't ignore the SJW menace. They use emotional appeals as part of their ideology and Political Correctness to bring about destruction of western society. [youtube.com] They're teaching this very SJW ideology complete with emotional argumentation method to 2nd graders now. [youtube.com] All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. Ignore these subversive Cultural Marxists at your own peril. [youtube.com]

        • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday February 15 2016, @07:28PM

          by Thexalon (636) on Monday February 15 2016, @07:28PM (#304827)

          Every guy faces the same sort of sexual harassment, but because we're been derided our whole lives as "virgin neckbeard losers" we just shrug it off and keep doing what we love.

          How many times were you asked to pull out your dick in an educational or professional setting? How many times were you told that you weren't cut out to be a programmer because you were a guy?

          I didn't think so.

          --
          The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
          • (Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Tuesday February 16 2016, @02:34PM

            by SanityCheck (5190) on Tuesday February 16 2016, @02:34PM (#305187)

            How many times was I asked to "help them with their programming homework" whereby the idea was I would do the whole thing while the female makes googly eyes at me... Hell sometimes they invited me to help them prepare for the exam and tried to derail the study session the whole damn time. My time is slightly more valuable than that. Subtlety doesn't make it OK. Eventually I just learned to ignore most of the females in CS, I guess I became what SJWs call a "raging misogynist."

            The real rub is now that I'm working half of my team is female, and I don't know where they found them but they are nothing like these aberrations I met at school. They are perfect colleagues, and more professional than me most of the time - a real pleasure to work with, all of them. They do not exhibit even a hint of attention seeking behavior - something I would totally detest.

            • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday February 16 2016, @03:16PM

              by Thexalon (636) on Tuesday February 16 2016, @03:16PM (#305209)

              How many times was I asked to "help them with their programming homework" whereby the idea was I would do the whole thing while the female makes googly eyes at me...

              That's not sexual harassment. Men can be victims of sexual harassment, both from other men and from women, but what you're describing does not remotely qualify.

              And the proof of that is that the only consequence you experienced for saying "no" to doing their homework for them was that you thought you were being called a raging misogynist behind your back by known idiots.

              --
              The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:41AM (#304533)

    NotSanguine, you made a typo in the article title. It should have been:

    Sloppily-Done Study Proves Nothing One Way or The Other: Still Useful for Narrative-Pushing

    • (Score: 3, Touché) by NotSanguine on Monday February 15 2016, @11:37AM

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Monday February 15 2016, @11:37AM (#304571) Homepage Journal

      NotSanguine, you made a typo in the article title. It should have been:

      Sloppily-Done Study Proves Nothing One Way or The Other: Still Useful for Narrative-Pushing

      Interestingly, the article is actually a merge of two submissions. One with the credulous reporting of the BBC [bbc.com] and an analysis that is harshly critical of the study authors' conclusions [slatestarcodex.com].

      It's not my fault that you're too hopped up on caffeine or meth or whatever it is you do, or are in a manic phase of your bipolar disorder, that you only have a tiny little attention span and didn't notice the latter.

      What's more, if you don't like the story, you can always submit ones you do like. You are welcome on our lawn.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
  • (Score: 2) by snufu on Monday February 15 2016, @11:13AM

    by snufu (5855) on Monday February 15 2016, @11:13AM (#304560)

    ...[The researchers guessed the submitter's gender] from the users' profiles or because their email addresses could be matched with the Google+ social network. The researchers accepted that this was a privacy risk...

    How brave of them to accept this risk to my privacy. I hope they share their secret on how to publish scientific research based on stalking, gender profiling, and guesswork.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @04:27PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @04:27PM (#304718)

      [The researchers guessed the submitter's gender]

      Guessed? They didn't even ask? How inconsiderate, going by gender norms. And what about trans people? Trans identities being erased once again. I bet they didn't even use the right pronouns. Have they ever checked their privilege?!

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @12:35PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @12:35PM (#304596)

    Women make pull requests and men push requests...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @03:37PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @03:37PM (#304689)

    Like a pull request from someone with an id similar to "netbsdgirl"? That kind of grief no one needs.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:32PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @05:32PM (#304777)

      I know! Netbsd that sorry excuse for an operating system...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:24PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @06:24PM (#304798)

    What the fuck does gender have to do with CODE!?

    This sexism must STOP.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:21PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @09:21PM (#304874)

      It doesn't. There is a racist agenda at play in tech. It's called "diversity". [youtube.com] And you really should take a look at what these people are actually saying. It puts TFA into context.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @11:40PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 15 2016, @11:40PM (#304947)

    I'm not opposed when there's a real story, real people involved, but this is not a story. It's an experimental study where both the methodology and significance are debatable.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16 2016, @05:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 16 2016, @05:21AM (#305062)

    My favorite part of the study (and let's skip the glaring problems of tiny differences and significance) is the conclusions. When women's submissions are accepted more frequently than men's, the 'obvious' conclusion is that women are more competent than men. When men's submissions are accepted more frequently than women's, the 'obvious' conclusion is gender bias. I actually like the story, but then I find bad science pretty damn amusing sometimes :).

    Gender bias indeed.