"Women write better code, study suggests". - BBC report on UNPUBLISHED and NON-PEER REVIEWED study suggesting female inherent superiority...

User-31f64a4e · 2016-02-14T14:12:55+00:00

This is utter bullshit, and anyone who actually codes should see it immediately.
Pull rate is not an indicator of coding ability.

It could reflect women doing minor, easily understood maintenance instead of non-trivial features
It could reflect women getting more third-party help before checking in their code
It could reflect gender differences in who feels confident enough to offer code; perhaps only the most skilled females have the temerity to offer code to open source projects, as opposed to the great unwashed of male programmers
It could reflect female programmers only addressing non-controversial issues and features, so that there is no resistance to the adoption of their proposed changes. Perhaps men attempt to steer projects in more controversial directions.

tl;dr Rubbish metric fails to measure quality

Familyfistingfun · 2016-02-14T10:34:07+00:00

I don't mind reporting differences on gender, and I love the BBC, but this is shoddy. The study hasn't been assessed yet so could be complete crap, plus it doesn't distinguish between amateur and professional coders of which I think there'd be considerably higher percentage that are men... So more errors. My final annoyance is that if the genders were swapped it would blatantly not be reported. If a study found 'men made better primary school teachers' would it be reported or dismissed as pseudo-scientific nonsense. Pah! Happy Valentines Day!

socialinjusticewar · 2016-02-14T14:26:18+00:00

Remember: women can be better than men at anything. Suggesting that men are better than women at anything is misogynistic sexism.

Samantha_Cruz · 2016-02-14T12:54:27+00:00

the article appears to be primarily based on the percentage of "pull requests" submitted that are accepted on GitHub.

i am NOT a coder and never claimed to be but i do work with several projects on github for software that we use at work. I have submitted hundreds of pull requests for relatively minor code changes, most were accepted and didn't require tremendous review mainly because they were pretty minor changes to fix grammar or look and feel issues. Meanwhile we have several actual programmers on staff that do more significant changes. The majority of their pull requests require significantly more review - Not all pull requests are equally challenging. My percentage of accepted requests is probably higher than theirs but that hardly makes me a "better programmer".

I am not suggesting that there are no decent female coders nor am I saying the conclusion is necessarily wrong; I just question how anyone could make such a broad conclusion about relative coding skills based on the criteria they are using.

Aatch · 2016-02-14T12:52:25+00:00

I read an article breaking down the paper and the reporting. The paper isn't brilliant, the reporting is worse. The difference in accepted pull requests between men and women is 1%, though we lack the information to know if that's statistically significant, and for "insiders", that is contributors that have made previous contributions to a project, women get more pull requests accepted than men. Furthermore, profiles with no clear gender had pull requests accepted more often than clearly-men and clearly-women did.

One important finding left out of the paper was that men are harsher on men and women are harsher on women. Apparently it was left out to make the paper "crisper", but it feels more like it undermined the general "men in tech are irredeemable sexists" vibe this kind of research tends to go for.

liquidfirex · 2016-02-14T13:42:00+00:00

[permanently deleted]

Keiichi81 · 2016-02-14T14:01:11+00:00

According to the study, when gender is non-obvious, men and women have equal acceptance (or "pull") rates. When gender is obvious, women have a slightly higher acceptance rate for their submissions.

How does this lead to the conclusion that women are better coders, and not simply the far more obvious conclusion that there is favorable gender bias for women coders on GitHub?

mochacola · 2016-02-14T11:14:55+00:00

Women write better code. But they don't do it, because ... they're lazy?

mtn_dewgamefuel · 2016-02-14T16:13:51+00:00

Worth noting that this study was conducted on April fools day.

AloysiusC · 2016-02-14T16:02:41+00:00

Anything titled Women Better at [insert variable] can make it into mainstream news and gain applause. The comments underneath are proof of it and that "society just hates women".

speedisavirus · 2016-02-14T18:19:00+00:00

Except they don't. If anything, now, women that are fully incompetent are getting hired to fill quotas. We hired one that couldn't even fucking write a for loop which I assume was to fill a quota. Despite her utter incompetence day in and day out she still gets high grades in reviews which has now inflated her ego which is harder and harder to deal with when we point out the shit work she is doing in code reviews. Refuses to accept feedback from far better developers. I'm far better than her but even those that are far better than me.

This isn't to say women can't code. My boss is a woman and she is possibly the most amazing programmer I have ever met. She can glance at almost any code and have a full grasp on what it does. But here we are. Affirmative actioning shitbags into these jobs.

Source: A programmer with years and years experience in a very competitive company, industry, and team.

TheDongerNeedsFood · 2016-02-14T21:16:10+00:00

Gotta give the ladies over on r/twoxchromosomes credit here. This article was posted there are they tore it apart in the comments.

One of the huge things that was mentioned is that all the data this study used was gathered over the course of ONE SINGLE DAY, and even then they only get a difference of 4% (78% of women's suggestions were accepted vs 74% of men's suggestions accepted, or whatever the hell their metric was).

So these people found that on a single, randomly chosen day, women's suggestions were 4% more likely to be accepted, and they somehow extrapolated that into "women are better computer programmers than men."

Yeah, I'd say someone has an agenda here.

ThreeLF · 2016-02-14T18:18:03+00:00

"The paper is awaiting peer review."

Well I'm done here.

MutilationVictim · 2016-02-14T18:52:45+00:00

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qemist · 2016-02-14T13:46:32+00:00

Yawn. The mainstream media publish stories about bullshit unscientific gender difference studies at least monthly on average. Every single one concludes "women superior" or "men evil". Typically multiple competing outlets publish stories that are almost word for word the same within days of one another. It is clearly orchestrated.

That's something that is worth looking at. Don't bother fretting about whether women are better coders. That is just letting them push your buttons.

seraph85 · 2016-02-14T20:14:57+00:00

This is a perfect example of the double standards of comparing men and women. When men outperform women the question asked is in what way are women disadvantaged that makes men are better at this. Yet there is never a problem flat out saying women are just superior.

Throwawaycoder232 · 2016-02-14T12:08:47+00:00

Throwaway because facts annoy SJWs even in the tech sphere.

I am overwhelmed by the amount of illogical arguments being put out by the SJWs at this point.

I was reading the article on a tech website I would rather not post. And it was in regards to a study of Github. Github. I'm just going to go on the record and say that Githubs code is very easily to look over. You don't even need a browser to download ALL THE CODE to your computer. By ALL I mean all that anyone has ever done to the project. EVER. If someone is marked as bad code, you can see it is bad code. Seriously, sexist behavior could not be more easily tracked if it was mathematics that was being written. It is that simple. It wouldn't work or it would take too much memory. Everyone would see the code. Everyone could test the code.

Here's some links on how GitHub works. Theodinproject- Git 101

Github Tutorial For Beginners - Github Basics for Mac or Windows & Source Control Basics

There are even log in features that tech companies have where employees compete to use the lowest amount of ram, cpu, and hard drive space for a project/code and EVERYTHING is tracked.

The tech industry could hardly be more helping in bias toward females. They have their own chat-rooms in learn coding website. They even have their own female only tech groups. I'm talking about blatant NO MEN ALLOWED.This would be illegal if it was directed toward men.

192873982 · 2016-02-14T12:40:31+00:00

Which is only to be expected, because much more men program.

If you take the best 0.1% of women and let them program, and at the same time take the best 1% of men, it's only logical that women would be better if we assume that they are naturally equal. So that wouldn't imply any kind of superiority at all, it's just stupid.

unpicked-username · 2016-02-14T18:14:53+00:00

I am a coder and I want to defend myself against this study before employers of programmers start employing women based off lies.

What is a pull request on github?

Github is an open source platform where people can make open source software, and have other random coders contribute to it. A pull request is requesting the owner of the git repository (a single project) to include a person's contribution to the final code. The owner can then accept or deny, perhaps the pull request was malicious?

There is no size limit to a single pull request, and measuring quantity of pull requests between genders is obviously a broken study. Perhaps women take lots of breaks, but issue a pull request every time they take a break as a progress update. Perhaps a lot of the women are adding comments to other peoples code to improve their documentation -which is hardly code at all. Perhaps woman would rather contribute a little bit to a lot of projects.

Ovendice · 2016-02-14T22:12:58+00:00

What people always forget in these male vs. female issues, who's better, is that even if women could do better at something like this, at the end of the day it doesn't even matter because the pattern you see with women over and over is they're sporadic with work and/or just work part time and stay away from pressure, quota and deadlines, etc. as much as possible and can't really be relied on because they also run from positions with any accountability.

That is the real reason 95% of women never really excel at anything and men run the world. Women like to just 'pop in' occasionally with work of any kind and make a big fuss about something and then suddenly vanish again. It's men who are the steady, reliable, day in - day out backbone of any and all work forces, with about 5% women mixed in there who are the exception to the rule.

EgoandDesire · 2016-02-14T22:46:04+00:00

This article by SlateStarCodex is all you need to know about this study.

In summary:

So, let’s review. A non-peer-reviewed paper shows that women get more requests accepted than men. In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage. When gender is unblinded, both men and women do worse; it’s unclear if there are statistically significant differences in this regard. Only one of the study’s subgroups showed lower acceptance for women than men, and the size of the difference was 63% vs. 64%, which may or may not be statistically significant. This may or may not be related to the fact, demonstrated in the study, that women propose bigger and less-immediately-useful changes on average; no attempt was made to control for this. This tiny amount of discrimination against women seems to be mostly from other women, not from men.

The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

Funcuz · 2016-02-14T14:03:46+00:00

Well, sure they do. They also make better music, movies, and art as evidenced by such revered musicians, plot writers, and painters as...well, we'll get to that later.

They also make better comedians because nobody can tell the same joke for 60 years like some women can.

Not to mention they're better at engineering. I hold this view based on the plethora of monuments and wonders designed by women.

Of course we all know they're definitely better at sports than men. Just watch your average WNBA game and you'll see for yourself how much better they are when compared to men.

We also know for a fact that they have a seemingly supernatural gift for multi-tasking. Anybody whose ever seen a woman park a car or even drive one will testify to their god-given ability in this department. On a related note, they're supremely gifted at things that require hand-eye coordination...like video games. That's why the best gamers are all female.

As leaders, we all know that women are better. They just are. They're so much more empathetic than their male counterparts and have an approach to doing things that puts everybody at ease and does nothing to encourage infighting and squabbling. I believe there was a woman who was interviewed by a British newspaper who recounted her success with a staff that was intended to be all-female. As I recall, that worked out magically.

Unfortunately, they do have certain weaknesses that appear to be inherent to their gender. One is the constant need for reassurance. Lots of back patting with women. Along the same lines, women tend to have a need for attention. Now, I'm not saying all women need constant attention but when they're younger there seems to be pretty much nothing that will piss a woman off more than not being the center of attention when it comes to whoever she has decided is the center of her attention.

So really guys... cut the ladies some slack on this. Don't question it because it just follows that women are better at everything given their history of displaying so much talent in all other areas of life and society.

rg57 · 2016-02-14T13:45:18+00:00

Having been a software tester, I found no difference in the quality of code coming from male and female developers. It was all bad.

I promise you, there is no such thing as good code. It doesn't happen, because everyone is always in such a rush... probably because they're broke (or will be if they don't follow the boss's schedule).

baskandpurr · 2016-02-14T15:47:33+00:00

So basically, a study finds no bias against female coders on Github except for one case where its down to a margin of error. Conclusion: Women are better coders and men are sexist.

ralphswanson · 2016-02-14T18:35:59+00:00

Institutional feminism, such as main stream media or academia, loves to publish that woman are better than men because they think it proves that misogyny prevents women from rising to the top at work. Lack less work keeps women from rising to the top. On average women work fewer hours, take more time off, retire earlier, avoid learning new technologies and refuse to relocate or commute longer. Statistic show this. I see it in every office. Women have the freedom to choose lifestyle over money and do so. Expecting equal pay or equal promotion for less work is simple misandry.

iamnotfromtexas90 · 2016-02-15T02:43:20+00:00

MSM is literally a joke at this point. It's basically become a 'gender studies occupied business.'

gsettle · 2016-02-14T16:52:29+00:00

And Bigfoot is a whiz at CSS - CNN

Folamh3 · 2016-02-14T16:56:17+00:00

Slate Star Codex's take on it:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/

Drmadanthonywayne · 2016-02-14T17:12:58+00:00

Putting aside the obvious limitations of this report, this bit was pretty weird:

"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," the paper noted

So when the sex of the coder is known, be they male or female, the acceptance rate goes down?

Darth_Sin · 2016-02-14T17:43:56+00:00

British Bollocks Corporation is at it again...

Why do the Brits still allow their taxes be used to fund this useless corporation ?

miroku000 · 2016-02-14T19:11:02+00:00

If they eliminate people who are well known to the community then they are purposely excluding a huge number of the most talented male programmers and very fewell female programmers. So, another way to state the results of this study would be to say that when you exclude the best male programmers and then compare what's left, females are better. You should expect that if male and female programmers are of equal quality.

anunusualname · 2016-02-14T19:41:33+00:00

The research is done well and has some surprising points. But it has a glaring omission: they didn't look at Quantity, which given all the other things they did measure, is a rather suspicious omission.

And of course, the research in no way justifies the headline.

Fizics · 2016-02-14T21:46:00+00:00

Publish clickbait, hateful article.

No comments allowed.

BetterBadIdeas · 2016-02-15T15:28:12+00:00

"Awaiting peer review"

There's a reason were hearing about this now and not next month.

don_Mugurel · 2016-02-14T16:24:21+00:00

The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men

When you take into account that there are less women working in the IT sector and the fact that those who do work are more likely to be more passionate about it (otherwise they wouldn't have picked up programming in the first place) then you can understand that the 4% difference does not mean jack shit regradless of what I have stated beforehand.

It's just a 4% difference, it non conclusive since it could be accounted for by a multitude of factors.

The same research stating that 4% more pulls done for men's code would have used the same arguments to "prove sexism"... in an anonymous setting.

And the IT sector is by far the least sexist high paying job segment on the market world-wide.

Companies and job offerers are so desperate to find good talented, or even so-so talented people that they would literally hier a monkey. They even hier high-school students if they are up for the task (in remote work cases).

Just in the U.S alone by 2020 there will be a shortage of 1million IT developers. In the EU by 2020 it will be 1.4 million.

No one cares what you do, who you fuck, how you dress, what your name is so long as you cumulatively do 2 things:

Speak (and write) in good quality English.
Get the job done in a timely fashion.

Edit :

"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," the paper noted.

If there is also a drop for men, then wouldn't that imply that the drop is related to other factors when the profile offers more details? (the gender is a non-required profile detail, and people who post their gender post a plethora of other details). What if they identified other info that turned them off E.G

I am a single parent in charge of raising 3 toddlers: *what you think you say: * "I am strong and hard working and also reliable"

What the company reads: "This person has a shit tone to deal with and will probably be late on his commitments due to his family taking precedence.

Durak2015 · 2016-02-14T16:23:01+00:00

Hahahahahahahahaha! Well, that's the only sane reaction to that kind of "study", especially by a corrupt shill like the BBC.

Glassiam · 2016-02-14T17:28:20+00:00

Is this because they talk in fucking code?

AliasSigma · 2016-02-14T17:47:00+00:00

I remember seeing this on twox, how did they take it?

theDodgerUk · 2016-02-14T17:57:50+00:00

Strange. I admit I only been in the industry for 3.5 years. 4 different company's, working my way up. I have seen or end heard anyone talk about any female coders

SuperDanceParty · 2016-02-14T18:34:08+00:00

I don't see a point in trying to measure arbitrary shitty statistics like ability to perform mental tasks between genders.

What the fuck is the point when you have to analyse each individual's ability before considering them anyways? All you're doing is pandering to progressives who give a shit, this sort of study doesn't contribute anything of value aside from that. I could do study on the coding ability differences between short people and tall people, or people who take multivitamins everyday vs those that don't, hell that last one would actually be worth looking at, unlike this fucking clickbait.

Besides, they shot the gun waaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyy too fast on this. Their narrative is showing.

2016-02-14T18:59:52+00:00

I wonder if the women behind this study could tell the difference between pull requests for code changes vs fixing typos in documentation.

My guess - no.

CreamiestCream · 2016-02-14T19:09:00+00:00

Sigh. That sign needs to come with a caveat: "I help build Enterprise Software, and I use my pussy as leverage to further my career. #Feminism"

MWcrazyhorse · 2016-02-14T21:06:21+00:00

Reminds of the multi tasking myth, which was viraly published after an even more bogus study.

ThePigmanAgain · 2016-02-14T21:33:32+00:00

Oh, please. Women couldn't even write a better laundry list!

Terminal-Psychosis · 2016-02-14T22:22:38+00:00

Oh god, who paid for this "report"?

some women are good at coding, but in general better?

Gotta wonder at the motivations behind this crap. Good women coders would agree.

Hateblade · 2016-02-15T01:09:35+00:00

Women write better code

Where's it at?

Correctrix · 2016-02-15T01:26:25+00:00

I'm willing to believe that those exceptional women who buck the trend and get into IT are some of the best; just as on my undergrad Modern Languages course almost all the students were girls, except for a few lads who were some of the best on the course. I'm even willing to believe that women in general are better at coding when it comes to making it legible and well commented, in the same way that women tend to be better drivers in the sense that they have fewer accidents due to greater caution, even though they may perform worse in other measures of driving aptitude.

But this study is unscientific tosh.

mrRuffles · 2016-02-15T02:29:33+00:00

TIFUbyregistering · 2016-02-15T05:40:24+00:00

Simply egregious.

Bergzz · 2016-02-15T10:08:57+00:00

So pathetic, that at the slightest whiff of women < men (at something) the press can't contain themselves. It's embarrassing that this isn't even published, or peer reviewed and the press have gleefully rushed out some shoddy journalism. The agenda is strong.

As others have pointed out, if the reverse was proven to be true in a concrete study it would never see the light of day.

Boggles the mind

TheRedThrowAwayPill · 2016-02-15T17:01:27+00:00

The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men.

Not a very dramatic difference.

Wargame4life · 2016-02-15T17:10:48+00:00

next weeks bbc headline "Jonsey is a bender" which they be the report from a toilet wall.

indi01 · 2016-02-14T14:56:18+00:00

Lol!

In what universe does a difference of 4% in "github pull requests acceptance" among a small subset of users (many professional developers don't even use github) make someone a better coder than someone else? Statistically irrelevant, it falls within the margin of error.

It really makes me think these people have no clue how real development in business works. Although I won't blame the authors too much for just submitting the study.

However, it clearly shows how desperate the people in the media are to find confirmation bias for their agendas, since they have no hesitation in linking a non-peer reviewed study which shows no significant differences between genders.

VoodooIdol · 2016-02-14T15:17:20+00:00

That's why they say "suggests", which is a correct assessment. Still kinda CNN-like to report on something that might be.

finebalance · 2016-02-14T14:27:03+00:00

Actually, that is very possible. You see this in many areas where the barriers to one gender (legal or social) are higher than those for the other. Of the gender that has more difficulty getting in, usually higher quality candidates get through. Hence, the average female candidate can be better than the average male one.

Title	"Women write better code, study suggests". - BBC report on UNPUBLISHED and NON-PEER REVIEWED study suggesting female inherent superiority...
Author	Familyfistingfun
Upvotes	844
Comments	157
Date	February 14, 2016 10:31 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/45psgn/women_write_better_code_study_suggests_bbc_report/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/women-write-better-code-study-suggests-bbc-report.956168 https://theredarchive.com/post/956168

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