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.

Self-Selection?

[Diss Champ]

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?

Re:Self-Selection?

[Pseudonymous Powers]

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?

Re:Self-Selection?

[ceoyoyo]

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.

Re:What about me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried Craigslist?

Baloney Charts

[avandesande]

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.