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Gender and Tenure Diversity In GitHub Teams Relate To Higher Productivity

New submitter Bogdan Vasilescu writes: Diversity in teams is a double-edged sword. Increased team diversity results in more varied backgrounds and ideas, providing the team with access to broader information, enhanced creativity, adaptability, and problem solving skills. However, due to greater perceived differences in values, norms, and communication styles in more diverse teams, members become more likely to engage in stereotyping, cliquishness, and conflict.

In a recent study, researchers from University of California, Davis and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands have analyzed the effects of gender and tenure diversity on productivity and turnover for more than 23,000 open-source projects on GitHub. Using regression modeling, they showed that after controlling for team size and other confounds (such as a project's age, development model, or amount of social activity), both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a small but significant fraction of the data variability. On an economic and societal scale, these findings suggest that added investments in educational and professional training efforts and outreach for female programmers will likely result in added overall value.

The paper describing the results (preprint PDF here) will be presented at the prestigious ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Seoul, South Korea, in April 2015.

2 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Really? by meta-monkey · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    /. are you fucking kidding me? This is every single fucking day now we have another story about gender this-or-that in tech. Give it a fucking rest.

    Diversity is fine. Let people do whatever the hell they want to do. But shut the fuck up about it already. Constantly harping on the same shit over and over again. Just like a woman, my god...

    --
    We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
    1. Re:Really? by gstoddart · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      Playing well with others makes this profession sucktastic?

      You think a sausage fest of assholes and idiots saying how cool it is there is no girls allowed is a perk? Really?

      Funny, my experience is the childish assholes are terrible to work with for a whole slew of reasons -- mostly because they're self entitled spoiled brats who like to throw tantrums.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.