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."

Comments

Re:Misleading title

[AmiMoJo]

The actual complaint to the BBC is quite insightful:

Complaint
A reader complained that the headline of this article was misleading, that the study on which it was based was so flawed as not to merit reporting, and that the terms of the report were not duly impartial in relation to the question of the benefits or otherwise of workforce diversity in particular fields of employment.

Much of it is a standard anti-feminist argument, but the bit about the headline was found to have merit:

Outcome
Whether the study should have been reported was a matter of legitimate editorial discretion and, in the ECUâ(TM)s view, the article did not deal with matters which were controversial in the sense which would require a balance of views. However, there were no grounds for believing that the women among the cohort selected by the study were representative of women in general, and thus no basis for generalising about womenâ(TM)s relative ability. To that extent, the headline was inaccurate.
Partly upheld

Note that they are saying the research itself and the idea that there might be gender bias is not wrong or controversial, just that you can't infer from the study, which only looked at women on Github, that all women experience this bias.

The Slashdot summary is actually worse than the BBC article. It inaccurately summarises both the original article, the correction and the study.

Re:Relationship

[lgw]

It must be raining frogs: I agree with AmiMoJo. This is how the human mind works - we are pattern engines. We fit what we see to the patterns we've internalized, even when we see very little. Usually, that works quite well: even our vision is mostly synthesized from minimal data (other than the very center of our field of view, the rest is mostly fake detail), but it works so well we don't notice. But sometimes it doesn't quite work out, from biases that aren't accurate to optical illusions. Helps to be aware of it all.

Re:Relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah look, the resident dynamic duo of distraction, trying hard to get people to not pay attention to how your side lost

Trump won
Brexit won
Apparently Milo got a book deal, and it's selling great on Amazon