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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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Monday February 15 2016, @08:29AM
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
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
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
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!
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.