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Pull Requests Are Accepted At About The Same Rate, Regardless of Gender (techinasia.com)
An anonymous reader writes:
Remember that story about how women "get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they're women)." The study actually showed that men also had their code accepted more often when their gender wasn't known, according to Tech In Asia -- and more importantly, the lower acceptance rates (for both men and women) applied mostly to code submitters from outside the GitHub community. "Among insiders, there's no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree."
Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline ("Women write better code, study suggests") and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell "if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender."
Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline ("Women write better code, study suggests") and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell "if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender."
Since both men and women have their code accepted at higher rates when you know their gender, I wonder if there is a relationship between knowing more about a person and accepting their code. Does knowing someone better mean you are more accepting of their work? If Beth is a working mother of 5 and you know this, does that knowledge make you more or less likely to approve of her code opposed to only knowing that someone made a merge request?
You've done the exact same thing you've accused BBC of, claiming that overall pull requests are accepted at the same rate when this is not true. Women were statistically significantly less likely to have their code accepted than men as outsiders and statistically more likely to have their code accepted as insiders.
We men write more bullshit, and we are proud of it. Until Linus puts us to our place.
People of all genders should team up and work to put an end to the divisive, discriminatory agenda we see promoted by leftists.
I've worked in the computing industry for decades. I've worked with men, with women, with men who became women, with women who became men, with people who didn't think they even had a gender, and with people who identified with multiple genders.
None of us ever had a problem with one another or with committing our code or our hardware designs because of our genders. We were there to get our work done, and whatever flesh we had in our pants didn't matter at all.
Then leftist sorts started getting involved with the industry, about 8 to 10 years ago. Many of them are commonly described as "Hipsters" or "Millennials". These are people who have been subjected to a rabid form of leftism from their earliest years.
Once these people got involved with the industry gender suddenly became an issue, because they intentionally made it an issue. Before they came, we all saw ourselves as colleagues. Then these divisive leftists started trying to partition us based on our genders, and to pit us against one another over injustices that don't exist and typically never existed.
Most of us older workers saw through this bullshit immediately. After all, we'd been working together for 10, 15, even 25 years, without gender ever causing us any problems. But when these Millennial sorts came along, suddenly it was supposed to be a big issue for all of us. Of course, it wasn't in reality.
The problem, however, is that the older workers are retiring, and being replaced almost fully by these younger workers who are so obsessed with dividing people into groups over trivial and irrelevant attributes. More and more partitioning is taking place.
I don't think that these Millennials necessarily know that they're doing it, because the leftist agenda has been so ingrained into them from such a young age. Regardless, they're dividing up workplaces that used to be very united and free from prejudice.
Professionals from all genders or lack of gender should work together to put an end to this leftist-inspired nonsense. If they want to play these pathetic games where they divide us up into different groups, so be it. We should just refuse to play their idiotic leftist game.
We found that in modern times, misandry is apparently totally acceptable.
Is it git-specific terminology for asking someone to merge back some branch to the main release?
But my preconceived notions! My social justice! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This is a huge misunderstanding of discrimination:
"no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree"
It is still unjust to give them preferential treatment. This is a common misconception from the early days of chivalry: putting a woman on a pedestal just because she is a woman is still discriminating against her.
If there were no discrimination at all, there would be no gender bias. The fact that the author does not understand this is an example of ... wait for it ... institutional gender discrimination.
This is a common mistakes in statistics when the researchers are trying to read the wanted opinion in the raw statistics. You can find the raw stats at the end of the file here: https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/
In other words, there are far less women than men in IT. The resulting causality failure is well known in the field of statistics, and is called a "Larry Bird". In modern days, Dafne Schippers would be the example.
In other words, no, white men are not better basketball players even though the stats placed them above the average in Bird's time. In fact, they're on average so much worse, there aren't many to begin with.
This would of course (going back to IT) be the politically incorrect, the unwanted answer. I don't know what the answer is, in fact I do not care, I just hope everyone in IT is happy. But I do note they only went down the path of proving the wanted answer, so this isn't science, just opinion trying to use the stats to make it look scientific. I also do wish they stopped using voodoo statistics for basically politics and, in this case, misandry.
I have one doubt about what is the factors of race? There is proverb on the internet, not 1 person is nowing if u r indian.
When it seems like men are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as discrimination against women.
When it seems like women are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as women being superior.
I propose journalists be forced to write these stories without knowing ahead of time which gender came out on top in a study. After the story has been written, the editor can go back and insert the proper gender-specific word or pronoun.
In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree
This could mean any number of things, it could mean that the sample is skewed. It could also easily mean simply that in those cases the women had better code.
That is not discrimination, that is pure skill-based result. I see no reason to expect actual discrimination based on gender over code quality, because in this realm where you are accepting new code into a project there are huge negative consequences (i.e. things may just break) for accepting code based not on code quality, but on other factors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Women get their code submissions accepted more = women are better coders
Women get their code submissions accepted less = women are discriminated against
We live in a post-truth society where the above is all the a) data and b) conclusion people need to drive action and policy.
Of course, writers will spend 1% of their text giving some kind of token acknowledgement to "it is hard to know for sure" and 99% to "the conclusion is very clear"
You've done the exact same thing you've accused BBC of, claiming that overall pull requests are accepted at the same rate when this is not true. Women were statistically significantly less likely to have their code accepted than men as outsiders and statistically more likely to have their code accepted as insiders.
Citation please? From the way the entry here is (horribly) written, it looks like gender is less of a factor than being a known coder to the group--which means that if you're going to do the statistical comparison properly you're going to have to be careful to make sure you break it apart on both the gender variable (unknown vs known woman vs known man) and on 'known to community' variable, being careful to make sure the numbers you're comparing match across the board.
Doing a bit of work to find the paper itself reveals that it's not peer-reviewed which probably explains why a read-through of the methodology is leaving me extremely skeptical on if they controlled for this obvious confound, especially since there might be additional confounds--for example, I'm not really seeing any attempt to control for the possibility that the rate at which skilled female coders deliberately adopt genderless/gender-neutral personas may be higher than it is for skilled male coders, meaning that the higher acceptance rate (of 6.2% higher then men's) is actually an artifact of that--and hey, since somebody might as well point out the elephant in the room, let's bring up the possibility that some people might have their GitHub persona more accurately reflect their gender than their LinkedIn profile because there are some employment discrimination suits you don't want to be the one trying to win.
I'm also somewhat skeptical of the whole idea that changing larger parts of code is automatically less cautious, since this seems a rather bad assumption on the whole. I would expect the amount of testing done before submitting the code to be a better indicator--but you can't measure that so easily, even if a small tweak could easily enough result in a kludge in the code becoming suddenly broken, meaning that a more cautious coder might end up submitting a larger amount of changes because they're both submitting the tweak and what is necessary to get the program working again after the tweak. (I'd actually be unlikely to submit them separately, unless the tweak isn't essential to what I did to get the program work again and the kludge itself is a particularly ugly thing that needs fixing no matter what.)
These are the kinds of things that will get brought up in the peer review process for a paper, so really, I'm not surprised in the least that it isn't.
As a side note, I am, however, pleased to have learned from this paper that, in fact, I can have my LinkedIn profile be gender-neutral, which is my personal preference.
We all know this isn't true.
Thankfully we live in a world where sex can be bought cheaply and the whole single life/virgin shaming mantra only serves to describe the stupidity of the poster rather than shame anyone.
As far as women not working as hard as men do, or women being inferior, i've observed that most women in this world don't belong to those categories; only feminists do.
I swear, feminist are for some reason the most uncivilized and childish of people. No emotional control, very lazy except when it comes to persecuting men,
very loud and obnoxious, very quickly turn civilized debates into insult games, dress and groom themselves as if they were still in their early teenage years,
have the sensitivities of per-pubescent children and require safe-spaces and therapy dogs to hug 24/7. If there is a good to do in this world,
i think creating a rehabilitation center for feminists to convert them into functioning adults is one. Sad creatures.
Typically a pull request results in pepper spray, a hard slap, a call to the cops or some combination of those.
Anybody have any ideas?. Bueller?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox
Journalists are terrible at actually reporting real news, doing real research, or providing unbiased data/results. Welcome to 2016 for the next few hours.
You, you... Fucking.... MAN!
My response to a pull request does depend on gender. It also depends on the body part they want me to pull.
Can you idiots stop the merry go round of SJW bullshit, and google hyperbole?
Have any women come forward to accuse the man of actually grabbing them by the pussy? Otherwise it's just telling a lie, something you SJW should be OK with...