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Women Get Pull Requests Accepted More (Except When You Know They're Women) (peerj.com)
An anonymous reader writes: In the largest study of gender bias [in programming] to date, researchers found that women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men, across a variety of programming languages. This, despite the finding that their pull requests are larger and less likely to serve an immediate project need. At the same time, when the gender of the women is identifiable (as opposed to hidden), their pull requests are accepted less often than men's.
You may want to go read the article. Unless you think being nicer works against you on a free software project. If that is the case then I may agree with you.
Fair enough. For the TL/DR crowd, here are some of the possible explanations presented by the authors:
- Reverse-discrimination against men? Rejected, per the observation that there is evidence of discrimination against women when gender is identified.
- Women take fewer risks, and thus are more likely to provide solutions that are accepted? The authors cite a study that claims women are, on average, more risk-averse than men. However, this is inconsistent with the observation that women change more lines of code.
- Women in open-source are more competent than men? This is the hypothesis that the authors support the most. They suggest it somes about due to survivorship bias and/or self-selection and/or higher implicit performance-standards in the female population of open-source coders.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
It's a term related to git, the tool a lot of us use to manage our source-code and revision history. A pull request is when you finish a task and you send your code changes up to the authorities of the project. When a pull request is approved, it means their code changes have been applied to the project.
I honestly don't mind submissions about gender issues on /. But I do have a problem with posting articles that have not yet been peer reviewed. It is at least good of the link to make that perfectly clear.
For distributed version control systems like git, mercurial, bazaar, bitkeeper, and darcs, there's no central repository. You can have an authoritative source, which is just like every other source aside from a fancy name tag. A pull request is a request to pull (and merge) a branch from another repository.
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A pull request is a definitely a "git-ism". It's a request to other coders to update their own local git codebase to incorporate the changes that the requester has made. So it is like a "request to commit" to some degree, but allows for decentralization.
So, you can accept a pull request to your own personal branch/fork and it doesn't have to go on the main branch. This allows two (or more) coders to sync their branches with each other, without necessarily impacting the main branch. Then at some point, when there is full agreement among the collaborators about what they want to submit to main, the merged branch with all their work (or any one of the up-to-date branches) has a PR generated for it, and the request is made to update the main. (Or perhaps their branch just becomes a fork of the original code and now that branch is "main").
Obviously, if the PR is accepted to the main, there could be rules about who can do it and/or under what circumstances. There may be a main branch committer, or there could just be rules to allow anyone to commit, as long as they aren't the author and that they have verified the changes meet the appropriate code review and testing requirements. There's no actual difference in the mechanical aspects of it; the main branch works just like any other branch aside from the designation of that branch as the "authoritative" code base for the builds and release candidates.
The interesting thing the study actually found was that pull-request acceptance rates dropped for BOTH males and females when the gender of the requester could be inferred from their username or avatar picture. In some categories that rate dropped more for males, and in others the rate dropped more for females.
But they ignored the drop in rates for males and considered only the drop in rates for females when jumping to their conclusion of "gender bias".