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

Relationship

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:Relationship

[dgatwood]

Actually, it's more like an uncanny valley. The first part was that for people outside the community (where you don't really know much about them), if you know nothing about the submitter, you're more likely to accept the code than if you know just a little bit about the submitter. But if you actually know them IRL, you're more likely to accept their code.

Re:Relationship

[Mr D from 63]

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?

I don't know, but surely there is something we can be outraged about. We must look harder.

Re:Relationship

[AmiMoJo]

And that is exactly what you would expect. People tend to be open minded when they don't know anything about a person. Once they know enough to categorize them, all the biases creep in. Then as they get to know them, they start to see them as individuals again.

Re:Relationship

[ShanghaiBill]

Why are these studies even being funded?

The original crappy study, that TFA debunked, was funded by the National Science Foundation under grant number 1252995. So your tax dollars paid for it.

I am not totally opposed to all research related to gender discrimination, but when researchers publish statistically invalid garbage, they should be banned from future grants.

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.

Careful, your slip is showing

[Solandri]

Anyone else notice the glaring sexism in the media coverage of this story about purported sexism in programming culture?

"get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they're women)."

When it seems like men are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as discrimination against women.

"Women write better code, study suggests"

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.