A/B testing the gnupg developers. Submitting patches as female and male pseudonyms

This isn't true. As long as the patches were IID (e.g. she generated patches and randomly chose which name to submit them as), it's a legitimate A/B test.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_and_identically_di...

Second, my primary source for whether a name is "female- or male- sounding" is historical lists of most popular baby names for each biological sex, found through google searches.

Furthermore, I certainly have bias. Unfortunately, I have so much bias! As someone who, in grade school, was named Charlie, and had the shit beaten out of me for it, I very strongly know how it feels to be a man/boy who doesn't fit the socially-prescribed norms. However, when I am writing patches for code which determines a user's security, I do not play games; I want that code accepted, no matter what. The code submitted as a "female" was usually either rewritten by a certain gnupg developer (often to include further vulnerabilities and UX pitfalls) or later accepted as a "male".

Lastly, if you submit 10-30 patches over a decade, it's not very hard to make the acceptance/rejection rates come out to nice even numbers. I don't think there's anything as high-level as "identity politics" at play here; I'm merely suggesting that there is bias and that all of us, no matter what our gender or how equitable we are, may have it.

There almost certainly is someone in the development team for whom this is important, given the reports that identical patches would be accepted after being "laundered" through a male dev. People will go a long way to defend their biases. For example, I expect this entire discussion to be flagged off the front two pages of HN and into oblivion fairly quickly.

> meaningful study

mjg59's reply: "Remember kids: never share your lived experiences without presenting your experimental design first".