Pull request acceptance of women versus men
peerj.com
peerj.com
I find this suspect, because, anecdotally, I can look almost any author of a PR and determine their gender to a high degree of certainty. Probably well over 90% of the time, just from their name + profile picture + handle. Try it for yourself..look at the latest commits on a random project and see how obvious the genders are most of the time.
So the claim that "when a woman is identifiable, PRs are merged less" is totally suspect, because they themselves can only identify the genders of a small percentage relative to what a normal human can identify. If people can identify the genders way more often and accurately, then the claim being made is bogus. Perhaps there is a correlation of strongly signalling your gender (to the point where an inaccurate method of gender-identification has no problem) to being a below average developer.
From the article:
> For gender-neutral profiles, we included GitHub users that used an identicon, that Michael’s tool could not infer a gender for, and that a mixed-culture panel of judges could not guess the gender for.
Of course, there is still the issue that they have effectively limited their sample to people with Google+ accounts which may affect the results of the study. Given that men's acceptance rate also dropped when their gender was identifiable (but not by as much) gives credence to the idea that there might be a flaw in their Github profile analyzer.
Further down they then distinguish between contributors where the gender can be inferred from looking at their name & profile picture. Splitting the group of those 35% which were identified via Google+ into two separate groups - identifiable vs. non-identifiable.
Which leaves me frustrated. It seems I want things that mostly do not exist.
Open Closed Merged Merge Rate 95% Confidence Interval
Women 8,216 21,890 111,011 78.6% [78.45%, 78.87%]
Men 150,248 591,785 2,181,517 74.6% [74.56%, 74.67%]
Many hypothesis are discussed in an attempt to explain this and the paper is well worth the read. Thanks to a documented GitHub API this stuff gets quite scientifically correct - everything is backed up with real-world data.
More quotes:
> To summarize this paper’s observations:
> 1. Women are more likely to have pull requests accepted than men.
> 2. Women continue to have high acceptance rates as they gain experience.
> 3. Women’s pull requests are less likely to serve an immediate project need.
> 4. Women’s changes are larger.
> 5. Women’s acceptance rates are higher across programming languages.
> 6. Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as women.
"For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable."
As a man in technology, I can't say I've ever felt personally attacked for gender bias.
Perhaps I do take it too personally - I do my very best to be fair and reasonable with all my fellows, whatever their various deviations (or not) from the industry norm might be. It's upsetting to me to be tarred with this guilt-by-association. I find it particularly disheartening in the venue of OSS: I've always viewed it as a truly fantastic collective charitable effort, yet lately it seems to be getting depicted more and more as some kind of refuge for white men to exclude everyone else.
To test that hypothesis, check if homosexuals behave the opposite way.
The paper's conclusion that "women are more competent overall" doesn't seem very plausible to me. If there was really a significant, consistent boost simply from being female then we'd see software companies that consist mostly of women or which are run by women outcompete opposite companies at least some of the time, and it'd be an effect that'd have been detected before. I'm struggling to think of any examples of this.
Based on my own experience of github and open source, however, the only times I have ever seen women contribute to open source, they were always being paid to do so. I cannot recall a single time that I came across a pull request or even just a regular patch from a hobbyist woman. Not sure why that is, but it has been a constant throughout my career - men do hobby programming and women don't.
Given this difference I'd expect contributions from women to be larger overall, tackling grunge work that volunteers wouldn't want to do, solves some real business problem, and more frequently be code that was tested for a while internally first so is less likely to have quality problems.
The fact that men are also less likely to have pull reqs accepted when their gender is known also seems likely to be a correlation with submitting from personal gmail accounts vs corporate accounts.
Possibly related anecdata: from my not insignificant, but still far from comprehensive experience nearly all the women who are developers in my area (not SF—I know nothing about that market aside from what I read) are with bigger companies (not necessarily software companies), and in fact there are quite a few women working as developers with those companies.
OTOH, startups and small software businesses around here do hire lots of women—but mostly as graphic designers, or in sales/marketing, or as project managers. Very, very few women even interview for startup software development jobs here (for whatever reason—I don't claim to have an explanation).
At Google there was (when I worked there) perhaps about 20-30% female engineering staff. Or maybe it was a bit lower, I don't recall, but it was pretty high. Yet as far as I recall, the new projects were typically started by men, I mean the bottoms-up ones. I never noticed it at the time, but thinking back, I'm struggling to think of cases where a woman started a new project with her 20% time (or even took it, actually). That might be just lack of data points of course. Projects created by employees weren't at all rare there, but it still wasn't something that happened every day.
Many women in software, by my experience, are from slightly poorer parts of the world: eastern Europe, Russia, China, India. I suspect to them programming is just a job; a way to earn good money. But it's not something they're especially passionate about in the single minded obsessively focussed way that men can be (and I'm guilty of that).
There's also probably a bit of a gravity affect happening. My entire career I've never been on a team with even a single other woman and it would certainly be a nice thing to go somewhere where that wasn't the case, so maybe it's just easier for companies that employee women to hire more women.
This is also something I have observed in my job. I am in a typical enterprise software shop and I feel like women are more likely to see programming as "just a job", while men are more likely to put more passion into it. But most people in general see it as "just a job", so maybe hobbyist female programmers are just rare because female programmers in general are rare.
Who knows.
For me it's a combination of not wanting to deal with the very abrasive personalities idolized in some open source communities and just preferring to spend my free time hacking on throw away code to experiment with new ideas. I write clean readable tested production code at work, I want my hobby programming time to focus on impractical educational exploratory programming.
It also just feels like I have a lot less time to write code than my coworkers, even though I'm the only person on my team without kids. Traditional gender roles are evolving but it still feels like I'm left with more life stuff to deal with.
One possible reason: Women have less free time available for hobby programming. There are some statistics on this at http://www.ashedryden.com/blog/the-ethics-of-unpaid-labor-an....
Another possibility: Women are in such demand in the industry that a hobbyist contributor will soon be hired by someone, and no longer be a hobbyist.
The reasons for being more careful could be all over the place, ranging from actually being better programmers to being more likely to receive criticism for a bad pull request.
In an industry that's somewhat hostile to women, it wouldn't be surprising that only the most competent women stick around, whereas less competent men stick around more than less competent women, dragging average competency of men in the industry down, even if the total number of competent men might be higher than the total number of competent women.
You're saying this in response to a study that showed the industry being less hostile to women, at least on this particular axis.
I'm explaining how hostility to women can result in a higher acceptance rate of their pull requests. As you could have seen from the numbers in this study, women do far, far fewer pull requests than men. Why? Perhaps, because only the best women remain, and they only submit their best pull requests. That drives the average for women up, while driving the total number down.
And I don't think the acceptance rate of pull requests is a likely vector of discrimination anyway; they're fairly anonymous and focus on the code. But the hostility absolutely does exist in other areas: small talk, jokes, hiring practices, sexual harassment, etc.
In fact, they both drop when identified to a point which (as far as I can tell from the graph; figures aren't given) they are within each other's confidence interval.
So actually, we're more critical of everyone when their gender is disclosed; equally so.
Which I find surprising. I'd have thought if anything, we'd be more trusting and supportive of the person disclosing a picture, name, etc. (the criteria used for gender identification).
Why though? My experience is that aside from everyone's monkeysphere, people generally tend to hate other people.
Social media where you interact with a higher than Dunbar number of people (ie Not Facebook) is often just a nasty status game.
Humanizing a pull request can bring all sorts of baggage from that into the evaluation of a contained block of ideas.
So to summarize the two: The overall acceptance rate drops from ~70% to ~63.5% when the gender is identifyable. Very interesting.
I'm not proud of that statistic. I used to be firmly on the fence regarding the subject of women being discriminated against in tech. With facts like that, there's no denying it whatsoever. We have a big problem.
I don't agree at all. There's lots of information missing from that fact that would be necessary to make this kind of determination.
If you control for change size, does the effect still show? Large changes are less likely to be accepted on some projects.
Also, all this is for people who have "google+" accounts. Does anybody still use that?
> 6. Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as women.
They should have added this:
7. Men have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as men.
Seeing those two together - equally justified by the text - suggests it might just be a small bias (~10%) against "outsiders" who use their real name in favor of "outsiders" who use hacker aliases...regardless of gender.
This is awful - I think it would be good to have some discussion around what we can do as a community to improve this?
> Specifically, we extract users’ email addresses from GHTorrent, look up that email address on the Google+ social network, then, if that user has a profile, extract gender information from these users’ profiles. Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user profiles with email addresses, we were able to identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of them as men or women through their public Google+ profiles.
I don't agree that the result is as strong as "awful" indicate because the paper concludes that
> Women had higher acceptance of pull request than men
> Identifiable women had higher acceptance of pull request than men
> Insider identifiable women had higher acceptance of pull request than men
> Both outsider identifiable women and outsider identifiable men had lower acceptance rates than their insider counterparts
The study proposes the existence of gender bias because, in this last point, the drop for women was higher than the drop for men, regardless of all the other instances where the opposite was true.
I don't believe the study is representative for the whole industry at all (GitHub being mainly remote, voluntary and due to the FLOSS philosophy mostly liberal) but this seems to be one to be celebrated because of the positive conclusion it showed for women.
The data is just convenient for anyone with a political agenda to make big claims. If the paper wanted to be genuine they could have gone further - what was rejected? Was there a valid reason? etc
So the question remains, why do both genders experience a drop. Once we answer that, we can look into why women experience a worse drop.
---
This quote doesn't seem representative of the whole story that is easily discoverable in the abstract.
> Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.
This paper gives the impression that the authors started out hoping to find evidence of discrimination in the form of a lower pull acceptance rate for women than men, they found the opposite, and then they data mined until they could find something they could use to argue there's an anti-woman bias.
"Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as women.".
Looking at the data, they say that the acceptance rate for female outsiders is 62.5%, but they don't say what it is for men. Looking at the chart it looks like ~63.5%. And acceptance rates for both genders drop by >=10% going from non-gendered to gendered. Can we infer then that the bias is somewhat across the board for pull requests from easily gendered users?
It seems likely to me that the bias here is gmail users versus non-gmail (corporate domain?) users.
Non-Google+ users were not analyzed at all. That could possibly still influence the results, but not the way you are suggesting.
A better methodology for a study like this would be to identify a number of people planning to make sporadic contributions to projects they have no connection to and making them submit the pull requests under fresh fictional profiles with randomised gender. This way, any irrelevant correlations between the kind of pull request being made and the requesting party being identifiable as female would be eliminated.
> Experiments and retrospective field studies each have advantages. The advantage of experiments is that they can more confidently infer cause and effect by isolating gender as the predictor variable. The advantage of retrospective field studies is that they tend to have higher ecological validity because they are conducted in real-world situations. In this paper, we use a retrospective field study as a first step to quantify the effect of gender bias in open source.
The research is presented in context, an important and valid context, too. At the end, they discuss potential explanations and never go so far as to say "And all of this is clearly because ______".
A controlled study would be a great followup, but I'd sure put stock in these compelling and well documented findings.
If they showed individuals with already high acceptance rates received lower acceptance rates on the same code when submitted from a gender identifiable account then I'd find it to be more compelling.
What is also true from the graphs, but the author does not emphasize is this: Men's acceptance rates are 69%, but drop to 64% when the gender is identifiable.
This is taken from figure 5. So in general, it seems the acceptance rate drops in both cases, as soon as the gender is identifyable. I do wonder why this is? The two just don't add up. It seems that the type of PRs that the authors have maanged to have the gender identified, simply have much lower acceptance rates.
It might be possible to flesh this out by looking at the domain names.
Obligatory: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
To me that would correlate with other studies based on first impressions, hiring, etc., where we sometimes subconsciously seek out people like us. Similar to another comment, giving any information about you allows me to put you in a box I have created, whether positive or negative.
However, it was only possible to identify the gender of about a third of people overall from publicly available information.
So for the conclusions of the study to be valid, one must eliminate the possibility that there is a gender imbalance in those whose gender is able to be identified by publicly available information (which would not represent discrimination, since that information is self-reported). Until one can eliminate this, one may not be measuring discrimination, but effectively just a correlation between availability of public information on programmers and their skill level.
Moreover, it looks like the gender information was entirely constructed from Google+. Yet there is no information on what percentage of users' of each gender actually had Google+ pages. This is extremely relevant to the conclusions as there could also be correlations with the usage of Google+ by programmers of a certain skill and gender.
I wonder if there's a gender bias with regard to making your Google+ profile public (or having one in the first place).
There is no compelling reason for me to provide any real information about myself online.
I'm not sure there's enough data here to create an understanding about the relationship between merge rate and gender. Various external issues could be the cause of the difference (I don't believe either gender is more capable) - for example (not sure if this is true, but it portrays how these stats could be skewed): In India, there's a higher incentive to be recognized in the community because competition is stiffer, so more people submit PRs. In this case, people who generally wouldn't submit a PR because of their lack of expertise are now submitting PRs on the chance that it may get accepted. The result is a greater number of PRs with lower quality.
These are the effects of having a global community. There are so many external factors I don't really think we can determine much of anything from these results. It's an interesting analysis regardless though.
I was curious so I looked up the Google+ API (https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/) and I do not see an "email lookup" endpoint. You can only search for generic information in public profiles. Searching for my own email, which is public in Google+, using that particular endpoint yielded no results.
I call shennanigans that 1/3 of the accounts in the dataset had discoverable profiles this way, and they were retrieved in a manner that is acceptable by Google.
There's so many hypotheses one could make about that (ratios among software engineers in general, differing interest in programming as a hobby beyond work, the confrontational culture among projects, hiding ones identity to avoid creeps, etc). It's a good start and we could really use further research.
[1] Sorry that's worded so awkwardly, but it's hard to phrase that without implying something unsupported by this particular data.
To me, comments like yours highlight the toxic nature of the software industry.
It is an expectation in software dev that we do most of our learning and development on our own time and part time work is generally frowned upon. GitHub accounts and side projects are becoming a larger part of interview processes.
How do you think this looks to prospective female employees? Basically it gives the impression that they have to be prepared to work 45-50 hours a week in order to be competitive.
This isn't compatible with many women's focus on flexible work for when they have children.
Notice that none of this is inherent to software development. Companies could provide proper on the job learning and development. Companies could be more open to part time work. Companies could use better proxies for developer skill than personal contributions to GitHub.
I don't think side projects are necessary to further your career, and it's been 20 years since I worked on one myself.
You do make good points that an individual may not have the opportunity to engage in a side project for reasons not related to competence. Your hypothesis that the hardship faced by many women once they have children may contribute to the statistic is well-worth further investigation -- like I said, there's many possible hypotheses to investigate, and more than one factor may contribute to the overall outcome. As an interviewer, I've only once seen an outside project on a resume and I considered it a plus; that may have been a mistake on my part.
I almost wonder if it's worse to publish non-peered-reviewed research or not. I mean it could be great if it's solid research but if there are flaws (even minor) it could undermine other studies, change people's minds, etc.
We considered a GitHub profile as gender neutral if all of the following conditions were met:
- an identicon (rather than a profile image) was used,
- the gender inference tool output a ’unknown’ for the user’s login name and display name, and
- none of the panelists indicated that they could identify the user’s gender.
Across both panels, panelists inspected 3000 profiles of roughly equal numbers of women and men.
Probably commercial employees?
If you don't have much time, skip to the "Discussion" section on pages 16 and 17.
Why leave out an exact number for men whose gender is identifiable?
* appear: maybe men or women have a different internal bar for how polished they'll make a pull request (how afraid they are of rejection, etc). the study looks at profiles that are closeted vs out as a gender. If you reveal gender on purpose, this tells us something about you, presumably, but for convenience the difference between closeted and out is taken to signify "bias against [out] men/women". Much of this is not statistically significant, probably (study doesn't give enough info, and suspiciously did an "insider" vs "outsider" analysis rather than a pooled analysis, suggesting they didn't like what they found until they split into two pools).
For unsolicited outside contributions, closeted men seem to get rejected more than closeted women (men's bar is lower?). Out men get rejected more than closeted men or women. Out women get rejected more than closeted men or women. The key is: for this category, people appear to be less biased against out men than out women (but somehow people prefer contributions from hidden-gender folks?).
Anyway, this is interesting stuff but I'm not sure what to take from it. I do expect more low-quality outside-team submissions from men than women, and I might judge them unfairly if they were out men, but this is just a random hunch and I doubt it would affect me much (probably I wouldn't notice).
Yes, I do remember that (having been using the internet several years before there was any such thing as a web browser), and I dispute your claim, albeit on the purely anecdotal basis of spending years on Usenet.
"When men were men, women were men and 12 year old girls were FBI agents"
People should ALWYAYS be measured by their performance not by their gender.
There is a reason many startups are teaching awareness of unconscious gender biases.
and i dislike it so much. I mean yes I know that some groups of people can't go well with others, but thats just something in our minds, because of our past.
Myself, I view this as a big problem and think it needs to b researched and actively mitigated. I'm a man, but I score much more like a woman on transgender-related psychological scales despite not taking hormones or engaging in SRS. When I play online videogames I sometimes identify as female (based largely on whim) and I can't help noticing that my female avatars have to put up with an exponentially larger amount of random bullshit from other players. I'm not cool with this, but neither do I want to live in a world where people feel the need to obscure or neutralize their gender, since that's a fairly fundamental part of most people's identity.
Our main research question was: to what extent does gender bias exist among people who judge GitHub pull requests?
To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub, then investigated why differences might exist.
We extract users' email addresses from GHTorrent, look up that email address on the Google+ social network, then, if that user has a profile, extract gender information from these users' profiles. Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user profiles with email addresses, we were able to identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of them as men or women through their public Google+ profiles.
== Results ==
Are women's pull requests less likely to be accepted? The hypothesis is not only false, but it is in the opposite direction than expected; women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men!
== Do women's pull request acceptance rates start low and increase over time? ==
[B]etween 1 and 64 pull requests, women's higher acceptance rate remains. Thus, the evidence casts doubt on our hypothesis.
== Are women making pull requests that are more needed? ==
[T]he result suggests that women's increased success rate is not explained by making more immediately needed pull requests.
== Are women making smaller changes? ==
(...) Women make pull requests that add and remove more lines of code, modify more files, and contain more commits.
== Are women's pull requests more successful when contributing code? ==
(For instance, changes to HTML could be more likely to be accepted than changes to C code, and if women are more likely to change HTML)
[W]omen's acceptance rates dominate over men's for every programming language in the top ten, to various degrees
== Is a woman’s pull request accepted more often because she appears to be a woman? ==
For insiders, we observe little evidence of bias when we compare women with gender neutral profiles and women with gendered profiles, since both have about equivalent acceptance rates.
For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong.
Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall (as we reported earlier), but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.
I hope that helps those who won't read the whole paper but feel the need to comment on it.
The last assertion, that the "results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless" seems to indicate that the paper results didn't confirmed the desired hypothesis but that there was need to highlight any incidence of gender bias anyway.
The conclusion that there is gender bias on the acceptance of pull requests by women while outsiders (as opposed on women as insiders or men in general) seems to be excessive sub-categorization in order to find a supporting result as the hypothesis doesn't hold for women as whole nor for the subcategory of identifiable women.
It is a very good result, demonstrating that, at least for something so unrelated to the average workplace as Github repositories can be (being in general remote, voluntary and more likely than not to liberal in tendencies due to the FLOSS philosophy), that an useful line of code is an useful line of code, regardless of who wrote it.
The point being, as stated the whole thing very much resembles the Berkeley gender discrimination study, so proposed improvements are quite obvious: break things down further by project, see if you can glean something from per-project (or at least per-domain) distribution. There might be nothing there, mind you, and the stated conclusions might still hold, but without controlling for the confounding factor there's no way to tell, and the conclusion of this study is therefore not above suspicion.
This is disappointingly rare, in my experience.
Edit: what a shotgun blast of downvotes and straw men. People are lining up to say all sorts of utter bullshit. For example:
* "Where does this indicate misogyny?"
* "The paper is about GitHub, which has a reputation for the opposite."
* "A good start is to stop calling things misogyny just because you're bad at reading statistics."
* "Of course it's important to recognize when it's actual misogyny and not just disagreement with the code."
The paper's findings are clear as a fucking bell: women have equal acceptance of pull requests, except when the pull request obviously comes from a woman. Fucking TEXTBOOK misogyny, and you're an idiotic trog if you don't think so. (Looking RIGHT AT YOU here, pluma.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074992 and marked it off-topic.
My comment was substantially more flamewar after the edit. Shame on me for that, but there were some fairly obvious troll comments there.
To flag a comment, you need to click on its timestamp to go to its page, then click the 'flag' link at the top. A couple of restrictions: (1) you can't flag direct replies, and (2) flag links disappear after 2 weeks, which is also when voting expires on a post.
Did you read the paper? Where does this indicate misogyny?
However, to call them misogynists is completely wrong and unhelpful and will only cause them to dismiss anything further. Misogyny is when men truly think women are beneath them, like that men's group that recently wanted to legalize rape.
For example, recently someone came into a chat room and announced "Hello gents". I immediately corrected him with "You mean "ladies and gents"" and he apologized profusely. This is unconscious gender bias, it's not misogyny.
Call gender bias what it is, gender bias, but don't overreact and call it misogyny when it's not. There are true misogynists out there, and to put those two people in the same camp is wrong and unhelpful and will only drive people away.
Yes, there is gender bias, and yes we need to fight it vigorously. I do not want my daughter living in a world where she is considered an afterthought, or even a single atom inferior to a male. I want her growing up knowing that she is a full equal to any male on every level. And it's an uphill battle because of gender bias.
But not all gender bias is misogyny.
Consider the method they used to identify gender - they based it on the email being linked to a Google+ account. This rules out most submissions made as part of corporate work.
So if corporate users submit better code than hobbyists then you would expect a drop. And you do see a significant drop across the board for gender-identifiable vs gender-indeterminate contributions.
"Calling out" the behavior consistently creates vigilantism, and puts an unfair burden on the accused. In instances of sexism I have never, ever seen the accused treated as "innocent until proven guilty" in the eyes of the online hate mobs.
Tim Hunt's experience was bad enough that he admitted to thoughts of suicide. This is a man fully respected in his field and has a knighthood, but still had difficulty facing the onslaught of hatred.
If gender isn't identifiable, why is it surprising at all that women have a higher acceptance rate? This is really annoying me, anyone else notice this?
> Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall
and stopped. No. Just, no. I'm inclined to disbelieve any study that claims one gender is better at programming than other, and that claim makes me automatically dismiss the rest of its conclusions.
> particularly for open source projects because they are genuinely interested in improving the code
I reject this on the grounds that there's no reason why women would be more interested in improving the code than men.
> "Will people reject this because I'm a woman? Better make sure it's as good as it possibly can be so they can't reject it based on that."
I'd be surprised to learn that this was the thought process of the majority of women, let alone most of them.
This is only true if you assume women in STEM are a random sampling. If you consider survivorship bias, it's quite possible that the cohort of women who persist are better, despite being fewer in number.
Or at least they've been told repeatedly that it's an uphill battle, by news media and activists with an ideology to push and clicks to farm.
It appears there are more than 150k men on github but less than 10k women. But if you look at real life, men don't out-number women 15-to-1, which seems to suggest programming on github draws in more men than women. I suggest that, whereas in addition to professional men, tons of boys will make a hobbyist account on github to leave inane comments on open-source projects, there are very few hobbyist girls that fall into this category; that is, a woman only makes an account on github if she is a professional in the industry.
Naturally, if you compare a group of professionals against a group of professionals + college-rockstar-ninja-guru-hackathon-"yeah, but is it optimized?" amateurs, the group of professionals without the baggage would be "better".
Anyway, that's my take on what the numbers say; maybe I'm wrong, in which case, I for one welcome our new female overlords; if they must put us all to death, may they do so with snu-snu
- women are more timid, so they don't even try submitting a PR until they're sure their work is good
- less determined women (who would perhaps also be less competent) are turned off by the culture of the industry
- women in the industry hide behind gender-neutral profiles until they have more experience
Given that in the above study there seems to be dramatically fewer women than men contributing to GitHub, take the assumption that in the general population men and women have similar distributions of programming competence, and it seems women are more strongly selected against to contribute on GitHub than men. It seems reasonable that the women who push would have traits associated with greater competence. Thus men and women have equal ability, but women on GitHub can on average be more competent than men on GitHub.
It's just information but you are right in saying that they should not be making any claims or drawing conclusions!
Also I casually give the wrong gender on websites because on the internet nobody should care.
Look! Somebody wrote an essay about a similar phenomenon:
Then you'd probably be upvoted.
Also, I refuse to believe that genders are obviously different in various physiological and mental traits (e.g. height, spatial awareness, ability to host a baby) except the ones that are socially uncomfortable to us.
I haven't seen any evidence that the second is true, though. I've not heard of a plausible mechanism by which - all else equal - men would be better at abstract reasoning than women or vice versa.
The paper makes no such claim. It hypothesizes that women on GitHub may be more competent than men on GitHub.
There is a ton of selection pressures involved that determine which set of men and women on Earth end up in the set of people that contribute to open source code on GitHub.
So, even if it turns out that one gender is wildly more competent on GitHub than the other, that may or may not say anything about biology or overall gender. Instead, it may simply point to some gender-asymmetry of those selection pressures.
There is a well established idea that glass ceiling-type barriers require higher competence from women to push through the barriers holding them back than men face.
Though I suspect you'll find the last sentence of this quote off-putting, it's often summarized as the following:
> “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.” - Charlotte Whitton.
There are many reasons that might be true without any gender being better programmers in general.
Or that the women of Github have a solid CS background at a higer rate then the men do.
The thing is, we don't really know.