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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.
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.
I suspect this may be a matter of the disposition of the team causing both diversity and efficiency, rather than diversity directly causing efficiency. Teams that aren't full of a-holes tend to accept more varied members and end up more diverse, and also happen to work well together...
Quoting from the paper
So, basically if you use a completely BS measure of "productivity" (# of commits) teams that are more diverse and with longer tenure tend to be slightly (1% to 2.5%) more "productive".
Where do I sign up for grant money to produce crap research like this?
They were measuring commit count and calling it "productivity". Commit count could actually mean that there were more bugs, thus more bugfixes commited.
/. 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.
I used to work for a company that was huge into making sure we had plenty of "diversity". What that meant, was that they didn't hire the best people for the job, unless that helped them meet their diversity quota. It meant that they promoted people who were more "diverse" instead of promoting the people who actually deserved it. These two categories only overlapped about 50% of the time. If you want more diversity, that's great. Do outreach to groups that aren't in the market sector, but don't crap on the people who actually went into the sector of their own volition, just because they aren't "diverse" enough.
P.S. I'll bet money that this report wouldn't have been released if their study would have shown any other outcome.
Teams in which everyone participates and isn't shoved aside work together, teams which act like high school cliques don't.
You can't force that to happen, but the best teams I've ever been on are more or less ego-less, or at least self correcting for maintaining some mutual respect and listening to one another. You duke it out in front of a whiteboard, and then work together the rest of the time.
Some of the shittiest teams I've been have been populated by people who were stuck in what they 'knew', unwilling to listen to new idea, and mostly closed to outsiders -- because they suffered from insular groupthink and being unwilling to listen to someone who isn't one of them.
Often the senior person in good teams directs, cajoles, and smooths things along ... but doesn't impose or dictate.
Willingness to say "this is what I think, but I want to hear if it's stupid" goes a long way to making teams work well together.
"Your idea is crap and you should shut up", not so much.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
... actual diversity.
Having a guy and a girl does not mean you have diversity of thought or ideas or talent or ability. It means you have one person that can pee standing up and another that can gestate babies if you give them 9 months and all the ice cream.
If you have a white girl and a black guy that does not mean you have diversity. You have one person that sits down to pee and one person that has to make sure he wears bright clothing when he walks at night to avoid getting hit by cars.
REAL diversity is diversity of MIND not diversity of sex organ or color. You can have more diversity with 10 black women then some random mix of genders and races because those 10 black women might actually be very different people while your random mix of genders and races might only be different on the surface.
This obessession with statistical diversity figures is tedious, stupid, and increasingly depressing.
I am not my gender.
I am not my skin color.
I am not my nationality.
How many people do you think that share my phenotypes are likely to agree with me or think the same way as I do about everything? I assure you... not a lot of them do. I am an odd duck. I am as likely to find someone with a vagina or a different shade of skin that holds my views or thinks the way I do as one that superficially resembles me.
Diversity is not gender or skin color. Diversity is mind.
And if there is anything ironic about the people crying for diversity it is how intolerant they frequently are of anyone that holds any view that is even a little different from their own.
What ever their intentions, they're not creating diversity. They're bullying everyone around them to fall into exact lockstep according to arbitary statistical data that doesn't actually mean anything.
Imagine if we were a bunch of cats. Does it really f'ing matter how many cats of some random number of spots are doing one thing or another?
This is the 21st century. Get over it. You're fighting last century's civil rights issues instead of opening your eyes to the civil rights issues of the 21st century.
What you should be concerned with are things like privacy, corruption, freedom, economic mobility, free flow of information, etc.
That is something that will actually matter. This gender/race crap is relevant only so far as you're dealing with actual racists etc. And since most of these claims boil down to subconscious bias the reality is that we know we're not dealing with the old bigotry anymore. There are bigger issues out there. Focusing on this if anything simply makes it worse because you're making it harder for people to be gender/race blind.
All this crap boils down to at some point is that people want UNofficial race/gender quotas. I think Channel 4 in the UK recently told their managers they'd only get bonuses if their staffs reflected specific race and gender quotas. That is what this stuff creates.
And assuming you got race and gender quotas ubiquitously imposed everywhere, how would that be good for traditionally discriminated populations? After all, everyone would know that they HAVE to be hired even if they're not competent because there are quotas. Which means everyone will assume right or wrong that they're incompetent because they can be hired without being competent.
Just think it through, kids. You're like that simple kid that shows up to track and just runs through all the hurdles without understanding he was supposed to try to jump over them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Open-minded people are more accepting of diversity, and will in the aggregate have relatively more diverse teams.
Open-minded people are more accepting of different ideas, and will in the aggregate have relatively more ways of solving a problem.
This does not mean having a diverse team will result in having more ways of solving a problem. Gathering a bunch of like-minded dogmatists from different races/genders is unlikely to result in any benefit.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Correlation between productivity and diversity does not mean that increasing diversity increases productivity; correlation is not causation. In fact, at least as plausible is the explanation that big, active projects attract a more diverse developer population.
A second fundamental flaw with the paper is that it uses an unvalidated measure of "productivity": taking some measurement (commit count here) and calling it "productivity" does't mean it actually measures anything like productivity. "Productivity" under this measure could be achieved simply by different "diverse" groups engaging in battles over commits, while actually slowing down overall development progress.
Peer review doesn't guarantee that papers or results are correct, but peer review can and should catch such obvious flaws in a paper and result in rejection. The fact that CHI let this paper in casts fundamental doubt on whether CHI should be taken seriously as a scientific conference.
Perhaps with a diverse team there is less shared extracurricular interest to chat about, so meetings tend to be more focused on the subject at hand.
Just a theory, not even a really good one.
There sure are a lot of misogynists on Slashdot these days. Anyone who derps about "social justice warriors" can easily be ignored as a wingnut dead-ender.
Don't worry, we accept you for who you are, and we respect your grammar deficiencies that make you special.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Translation:
Anyone who disagrees with me can be ignored since I am better than them.
By "tenure" they mean experience. They don't say why they didn't call it "experience".
Not to mention the massive advances of the Industrial Revolution, continuing through the technical advances of the 19th and the first two-thirds of the 20th. Since then things have become pretty lame in the West, which now largely spends its time and money navel gazing, and wondering whether it is being politically correct enough. Which is why China and India are now getting ahead of the West, having no such distractions.
These things are to do with fashion. Currently, "diversity" is in fashion in the West, and whatever is in fashion is likely to attract brighter, younger people. If homogeneity were in fashion, that would attract brighter people. As a historical example, early medieval monasteries, about as homogeneous as communities could get (at the time) attracted the brightest young men. That is because they were in fashion at the time; and even if you did not want actually want to join one, you sponsored one if you were rich enough. The monks wanted to get away from the bustling, hedonistic, "vibrant", "diverse" society outside, which they saw as a world that would not last much longer, and was descending to Hell. Of couse, by the late middle ages many of the monks had become "diverse" and "vibrant" themselves, meaning that they had turned some monasteries into bawdy houses and drinking dens. One reason why Henry VIII could dissolve them.
The fashion for diversity might soon be over however, now that people are beginning to see how it works in practice, especially recently.