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.

Comments

Re:Just a thought...

[ClickOnThis]

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.