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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: 4, Interesting) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @08:50AM
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
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @12:09PM
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
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
SoylentBob suggests to have a "funny -1" to rate bad jokes ;-)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by Vanderhoth on Monday February 15 2016, @02:30PM
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
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...
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday February 15 2016, @04:10PM
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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday February 15 2016, @05:38PM
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.
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)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday February 15 2016, @06:17PM
> 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
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
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.