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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?
We men write more bullshit, and we are proud of it. Until Linus puts us to our place.
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?
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.
Because it's flamebait. It's got everything - gender, hipsters and millennials, wise older workers, leftists, claiming other people's issues aren't real... It could easily have been copy/pasted from the /. troll playbook.
I hope it's a sign that people are finally getting fed up with the denials and moaning about it all being a non-issue, and are actually interested in commenting on the story. There is an interesting story here, but the GP completely ignores it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Talk about a woosh moment
BTW The truth is an absolute defense against libel or slander in the real world
Anymore bullshit buzzword bingo you'd like to play.
Are you human or a Markov chainer built on pure crap and anger?
What the fuck are you on about "Leftism"? If you mean "Not Rightism" I'm not sure what the fuck that is either.
I'm about as left as they come without veering into communism. Big state? Tick. State healthcare? Tick. State owned essential industries and utilities? Tick.
Do I or any of my 'leftist' friends buy into this "equality is a leftish plot' crap? NO! Maybe 'cos we'll all 40+ and, as you say, have worked along side people of many and all persuasions for a long time. Hell, we are even of those "minorities".
I'm not sure this is a left/right thing. There just seems to be a very vocal number of people on both the left AND right who think their $insert_tag_or_noun_here should somehow be enshrined in regulation and law.
The older left (e.g. me) realise this is poppy cock and in fact the law and regulations should be BLIND to those differences.
And your response seems to sum this up (I think). By definition freedom comes from an inclusive and not exclusive law.
And much like the "new right" my solution to the SJW problem is simply not to listen to them!
I'm not a hipster, a millennial or a leftist. But I do see gender issues in tech, for both men and women. It's not about dividing people and games, it's about making things better for everyone.
For example, there was a guy who had his first child at one place I worked. The boss was very upset when he said he wanted to take his full paternity leave allowance, and implied he would never have hired him if he had known. He then spent the next six months berating him for not being a "real man" and not making "his woman" bring up the child.
He ended up quitting before the child was born in the end (long story). If you don't think it's a problem then fine, you are entitled to that, but don't be a dick by moaning about other people trying to address it. It's not a conspiracy against you, unless you think the manager was right.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.
Flamebait? Do you even remember life before internet? We loved it because only your mind mattered. No one cared if you were an adult or a kid, only which of the two you acted like. People would collaborate based on code.
Then political people started up, like you. You have an agenda and you push it every single time, all agenda, no code. That's toxic to building a community and you end up destroying those you join. You eventually wind up with projects that are more politics than code, nothing gets done, and new projects spring up that the cycle may continue.
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.
Typically a pull request results in pepper spray, a hard slap, a call to the cops or some combination of those.
Because he used "leftist" and "millennial" like 30 times as derogatory terms. That is the flamebait.
Sounds like the boss was flirting with a constructive dismissal case.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Anybody have any ideas?. Bueller?
BTW The truth is an absolute defense against libel or slander in the real world
"I really believe this I promise and my opinion is worth more" isn't quite the definition of "truth" that is also the one that is an absolute defense against anything.
It's an example. It's not subject to availability bias.
If that sounds a bit vague, well, you complained about terms to clarify being flamebait... so fuck off.
I'm sorry, was this sentence meant to convey something? Because it is incomprehensible.
Yeaaaaaaah, No.
It might have ended up that way if he hasn't emigrated to New Zealand first.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC