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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, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday February 15 2016, @03:07PM
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
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
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
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
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.