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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.
Charts that show a percentage range (ie. 60% to 80%) instead of the actual percentage (0% to 100%) to exaggerate differences between amounts on the chart.
love is just extroverted narcissism
First off they trumpet the fact that they discovered that women's merge acceptances were higher than mens. It's only when they sliced the one hundred thousands of accounts for "gender confirmation" that they decided that bias existed because success rates went from 72% to 64% - The error deviation of that alone should cover the spread.
Secondly the sample rating is awful - They compare TWO MILLION male checkins to ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND female checkins without any criteria for context, quality, need or style... just "quantity" and say that because the PERCENTAGE RATES FOR ACCEPTANCE are "higher" it must mean the women programmers are "Better" when comparing 2 sample sets with 20x the difference of checkins as they're all EQUAL.
Sorry. That's BS.
This is not science, this is propaganda statistics and poor statistics at that but I'm sure they made full use of their government funding to study gender issues in STEM fields.
Not all useful changes are treated the same. Bug fixes get higher priority, doing what the boss thinks is important gets more priority, infrastructure changes which overall are an improvement but which causes a need for others to fix code or learn something new tend to get lower priority. Smaller means easier to quickly understand and thus more likely to be accepted quickly. Logically some of these things getting lower priority are actually very important but get overlooked as they're not directly related to the immediate bottom line and quarlerly profits (in the corporate world anyway, though some of this exists in a slightly different form in open source).
And that's sort of what they implied. Pull requests from women tended to be larger or less likely to serve an immediate need. This is not to say that those are better or worse on merit, just treated differently.
To stereotype perhaps, the women tend work on things that need to get done in the long run and avoid quick and dirty fixes, men tend to work on things to impress the boss and worry about cleaning it up later? I have seen some small trend this way in my experience, as the worst code bases to maintain that I've worked on tended to be developed in all male groups, and easier to understand and maintain code came from mixed developers. And in my experience at least, I've see more women caring about long term architectural issues and few who were engaged in the quick and dirty check in.
First impression: somebody needs to learn about statistics that have more than one predictor variable.
Second impression: despite the lack of appropriate analysis, the differences in figure 5 are big enough to be reasonably clear. It looks like there is discrimination against anybody who has a gendered profile (maybe maintainers don't like pictures?). This discrimination might be slightly greater against outside women, and is fairly likely greater against inside men.
Third impression: the paper and the Slashdot summary have a strong gender bias; they mention only the small and borderline significant anti-female bias while ignoring the more significant anti-male bias and also the much larger anti-(either) gender identifiable bias.