Recently, I became a fan of the ABC program Agent Carter. One of the underlying themes of the show is that society often overlooks women and their talents and accomplishments. In other cases, we as men assume superiority based on simply being men. While Agent Carter has her ways of addressing or manipulating these assumptions on TV, in the real world, we have studies to correct such erroneous assumptions. A recent study on women and coding serves as the latest case study. Consider a recent article for Fusion titled “Women are better at coding than men—if they hide their gender.”
Kristen V Brown of Fusion writes, “In a study published this week, a group of computer science students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and North Carolina State University examined how gender impacts the acceptance of contributions on the open source code repository site GitHub. ‘Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s,’ the study’s authors wrote. ‘However, when a woman’s gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.’ In other words, if you’re a woman on GitHub, the best way to get your code out there is to hide the fact that you’re a woman. The authors specifically examined ‘pull requests’ on GitHub, programmer parlance for suggestions for fixes to existing code. They looked at the contributions of women and whether the women had gendered or gender-neutral profiles. They found that women’s fixes were more accepted than men’s for every programming language in the top ten. But when gender was identifiable, the acceptance rate for women’s code fixes dropped to 62.5% from 72%. On projects where the woman’s gender was obvious and she was an ‘outsider’—an anonymous online stranger rather than a regular contributor to a software project—the acceptance rate of suggestions dropped below the rate of men.”
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