The researchers, from the computer science departments at Caly Poly and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day – 1 April 2015. They did this by pulling over 4 million email addresses from GitHub user, of which 1.4 million also had Google+ accounts. It was then discovered that as soon the gender information of the coders was revealed, the rate at which the codes of women were accepted, fell way below that for men. After receiving a pull request, the owner of the project can choose whether or not to accept it. The researchers found that pull requests from women to projects they were not involved with were accepted more often than those from men.
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That only holds true, though, when profiles of users are stripped of their gender. Yes, the study authors did attempt to identify the gender of every GitHub user before including that user in their study data set.
The researchers accepted that this was a privacy risk but said they did not intend to publish the raw data.
According to the paper, “Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men”. “Women disproportionately make contributions that projects need more urgently”. Specifically speaking, the researchers found that the rate of acceptance of code from women coders was 78.6 percent; while that from male coders was 74.6 percent.
“At the very most, men who don’t know me sometimes explain things to me that I likely understand better than they do”, she said.
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According to The Guardian, the study took 3m of these pull requests and analysed them to see whether there was any difference in acceptance between software designed by women and men. “Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless”. This is evidenced by the gender disparity at leading Silicon Valley companies – only 18 per cent of Google’s global technical staff are women. ‘Knowing that women are great at coding gives strength to the case that it’s better for everyone to have more women working in tech. “So if women aren’t making software, the end software may be somewhat exclusionary”.
