> 6. Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as women.
This is awful - I think it would be good to have some discussion around what we can do as a community to improve this?
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.