Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
Have you tried Craigslist?
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.
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
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.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
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
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.
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.
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".
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?
", 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.