Data analysis of GitHub contributions reveals unexpected gender bias: "Women's contributions to open source are more likely to be accepted than men's."

hugboxer · 2016-02-12T08:31:48+00:00

We began by stating our conclusion that women are discriminated against in open source communities, and then we gathered data to prove it. Our first attempt was a complete failure, though -- the statistic we produced implies the exact opposite of our conclusion. But then we hit on the idea of introducing additional variables to subdivide the data. This allowed us to find a specific subset where our conclusion held true. Having thus proved our conclusion, we considered our analysis complete.

busymath · 2016-02-12T06:01:43+00:00

I sort of wonder if this is a result of the fact that women are more likely to pursue fields they excel at then men are. I go to uwaterloo which is pretty well known for math/CS and the profs have found that generally the few women who are in CS do on average better then the men who have a much wider range of grades.

Tldr: the few women who code tend to be the best women who code, lots of men code meaning more men are bad at coding

Hamakua · 2016-02-12T14:44:39+00:00

I've witnessed this phenomenon for years but there is no way to broach the subject because "sexism". I've seen inferior technical work by women get accepted and praised over superior but thankless technical work by men just because of the genders involved.

I've seen final products developed that were objectively inferior to what their potential could have been based solely on the genders and their respective contributions involved in the project. I've seen token "office girls" pushed up through the ranks of tech jobs with no training, no portfolio, no nothing - and all along the way get more ambiguous but "highly technical sounding" titles attached to their arbitrary position. Then seen them put in charge of "managing" a team of "lower" male workers who do all the work and could have done so without any manager directly above them.

Essentially busy work given to a gender over more technically talented people simply so a false label can be given to a specific gender so it can be represented that particular member of that gender is no different and possibly even more talented than the people they are "managing."

Worst part?

Women who are actually talented and technically apt to the same level as the "Guys" exist, just in far fewer numbers - they more often than not get "Stuck" in the lower positions because the "higher token positions" at least in some areas are there specifically for the inept.

This isn't saying women specifically are inept at tech jobs - but those positions are ear marked (currently) for the inept and corporate pressure is pushing to "hire more women" instead of not worrying about the diversity pie chart and simply hiring the most qualified.

This means that the token "throw away" inept positions get filled with women because of the quota pressures - and because of that a false representation of women is embedded in the tech firm.

People learn now that instead of it being a case of "women are as apt as men at tech jobs - it's just not as popular" You have an engineered situation where observing the attempt at 50/50 will show you "women are simply not as apt at tech jobs as men" Because most of the women put above men simply to fulfill a quota - qualifications and ability be damned - become the "face" of women's ability in tech firms.

I could go on for days.

MalibuStayZ · 2016-02-12T06:56:12+00:00

No matter what the explanation—and it's likely some combination—we have further evidence that there is measurable bias against women in computer science.

I can't help myself, but it seems to me that this would have been the conclusion no matter what the data had shown.

autotldr · 2016-02-12T02:19:54+00:00

This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 92%. (I'm a bot)

Based on previous work done on women in computer science, which has revealed that women consistently earn lower salaries than men and have to prove their worth more often, the researchers hypothesized that open source project leaders would incorporate fewer contributions from women into their code.

Perhaps men involved in open source had a "Helper" complex, and they wanted to bring women into the fold so badly that they merged women's pull requests more often than they did men's.

So why are women in open source more competent than men? Given that there is no "Computer science gene" that occurs more often in women than in men, there has to be a social bias at work.

Extended Summary | FAQ | Theory | Feedback | Top keywords: women^#1 men^#2 more^#3 contributions^#4 open^#5

DoHaze · 2016-02-12T08:14:57+00:00

I strongly encourage everyone to go and read the comment section of this article on Ars, there is a lot of very informative posts.

For my part, I think this study came with an agenda, looking for a bias, and many parameters were not factored in.

Flaktrack · 2016-02-12T15:44:21+00:00

When a woman offered a pull request on an open source project where she was an outsider—in other words, where none of the project leads knew her—her contributions were far less likely to be accepted than ones from outsider men. Far from showing bias against men, this showed a bias against women.

I love how they're ignoring that gendered profiles for insiders show women actually having a higher rate of success than men. It's almost like it's not actually bias against women so much as bias against certain user types, namely the ones who proudly display their blue hair while they crush the patriarchy one unsolicited pull request at a time.

we have further evidence that there is measurable bias against women in computer science

How can you come to this conclusion from a single set of data? "Unknown women are less likely to have their submissions accepted" is simply not enough information to infer this conclusion, let alone any conclusion at all.

hackableyou · 2016-02-12T07:59:23+00:00

All things being equal, contributions from unknown women were accepted less often than contributions from unknown men.

Could it be that men are just better coders than women? I am not saying yes or no because I don't know, but why do the researchers say the above and can not even consider it? Nobody seems to have a problem saying that mothers are better parents than fathers. Why can't we consider it when it is the opposite?

Title	Data analysis of GitHub contributions reveals unexpected gender bias: "Women's contributions to open source are more likely to be accepted than men's."
Author	trot-trot
Upvotes	37
Comments	19
Date	February 12, 2016 1:44 AM UTC (10 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/45ccjv/data_analysis_of_github_contributions_reveals/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/data-analysis-of-github-contributions-reveals.956323 https://theredarchive.com/post/956323

Comments