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Women Get Pull Requests Accepted More (Except When You Know They're Women) (peerj.com)

Posted by yaelk on from the women-in-the-workplace dept.

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.

6 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. Self-Selection? by Diss+Champ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it possible that those women who don't feel it necessary to point out their gender in situations where gender doesn't matter tend to also be those more likely to communicate well?

    Is it possible that those women who make it a point to draw attention to their gender in situations where there is no reason to bring up gender at all, are also more likely to be less convincing regarding the usefulness of their work?

    1. Re:Self-Selection? by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Interesting point. Also worth asking is:

      Is it possible that those developers who don't feel it necessary to point out their favorite college sports team in situations where their favorite college sports team doesn't matter tend to also be those more likely to contribute worthwhile changes? Is it possible that those developers who make it a point to draw attention to their favorite college sports team in situations where there is no reason to bring up their favorite college sports team at all, are also more likely to be less convincing regarding the usefulness of their work?

    2. Re:Self-Selection? by lgw · · Score: 4, Insightful

      possible that those developers who don't feel it necessary to point out their favorite college sports team in situations where their favorite college sports team doesn't matter tend to also be those more likely to contribute worthwhile changes?

      The double-negative makes it hard to parse, but I think I agree: "people who point out unimportant distractions about themselves have lower-quality submissions". Seems perfectly reasonable to me.
       

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
  2. What a crap summary by avandesande · · Score: 4, Insightful

    After reading the article it appears that women lead pull acceptance in every case except for one edge case, and not by very much(its like 64% vs 63%). Nothing interesting at all here.

    --
    love is just extroverted narcissism
  3. Re: Just a thought... by loufoque · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I systematically google anyone who sends me a pull request. I assume most people do the same.
    Why wouldn't you be curious about that person that not only uses your software, but also took the time to fix a bug in it?

  4. Re:Just a thought... by Dr.+Evil · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ", per the observation that there is evidence of discrimination against women when gender is identified."

    Not sure how they come to this conclusion when they indicate that when the gender is identified, BOTH genders see a significant drop and men see a *greater* drop when they're known to the project. It's only when the women are unknown that their acceptance rate is lower... but even then, the acceptance rate of men and the acceptance rate of women's error bars overlap... it's entirely possible there's no difference between the genders when the contributor is unknown.

    In fact, the only place in their pull request acceptance rate error bars don't overlap on p15 is where identified male insiders are rejected at a greater rate than women.

    "We hypothesized that pull requests made by women are less likely to be accepted than those made by men."

    Seems like bad research... start with a hypothesis and highlight areas of your study which weakly support it, ignore areas which strongly refute it.