A published study on the coding competency by sex. Thoughts?

Oncefa2 · 2019-12-02T09:46:46+00:00

The competency aspect of the study is explained fairly well in terms of survivership bias and other common factors. The fact that fewer women are interested in stem means that the ones who are tend to be disproportionately talented. In other words, men and women as a whole may be equally competent. But only disproportionately competent women end up going into the field. The study points all of this out, but the abstract is a little dishonest in how they state it (they state it as if women are naturally more talented than men).

The question of a bias is a little less strait forward though. Very few profiles have identifiable genders, and even fewer have identifiable genders present in their user names (where it's most visible -- I doubt people are reading through profiles to see what someone's gender is before accepting code changes). They go on and on about the size of their data sample, but they do not specify how big of a sample they have for that subset of users. The fact that they manually looked at their user profiles, by hand, tells me that it can't be a very large sample.

It would be a bit like looking at Reddit to find a gender bias when 99% of the accounts aren't obviously men or women (and the ones that have gendered user names are usually pretty annoying).

A much larger factor than any kind of gender bias might be a bias for certain kinds of people to specific their gender in their usernames or profile images. And then another possible bias against profiles where gender is obvious (because they are perceived as being self-centered).

Usernames like MachoCoder and PinkRainbows might both face biases due to other people assuming that they're unnecessarily self-centered. And it may be the case that women advertise their gender online more often than men. It may also be the case that people who unnecessary advertise their genders are less competent in general (not to mention, many people pretend to have a different gender online, and those people may also be perceived to be annoying).

In other words, they have established a correlation between profiles with visible genders, and a tendency for those profiles to receive fewer pull requests. The idea that people are less likely to accept pull requests when they know the user is a woman is therefore not necessarily clear from the data.

It is also true that "obvious female profiles" overall have a higher acceptance rate. To "prove" a bias against women, they had to single out "first time users" vs "regular users". There is a small pro-female bias for regular users, and a modest anti-female bias for first time users. And for some reason they pay far more attention to the later than to the former.

So the specific claim really turns into "first time users who unnecessarily advertise that they are women are less likely to have their requests granted". They have not established that those users are equally competent, they have not established that this bias applies more broadly (in fact an anti-male bias applied more broadly), and they have not established that people may simply find those users more annoying.

werubim · 2019-12-02T14:57:16+00:00

Its possible that the women are working on easy tasks with low complexity (and thus high probability of acceptance), whereas the males are likley working on more difficult, advanced and complex contributions (and thus a higher probability of rejection).

Remember that a pull request (a contribution of code) can range from anything between simply renaming a file to inventing sentient AI

Title	A published study on the coding competency by sex. Thoughts?
Author	Strikester101
Upvotes	1
Comments	6
Date	December 2, 2019 8:16 AM UTC (6 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/e4w1px/a_published_study_on_the_coding_competency_by_sex/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/a-published-study-on-the-coding-competency-by-sex.1064352 https://theredarchive.com/post/1064352

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