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Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men (www.researchgate.net)

submitted 4 months ago by rimu@piefed.social to c/foss@beehaw.org

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Our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's [when their gender is hidden]. 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.

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[–] rbn@sopuli.xyz 51 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (18 children)

Anyone found the specific numbers of acceptance rate with in comparison to no knowledge of the gender?

On researchgate I only found the abstract and a chart that doesn't indicate exactly which numbers are shown.

edit:

Interesting for me is that not only women but also men had significantly lower accepance rates once their gender was disclosed. So either we as humans have a really strange bias here or non binary coders are the only ones trusted.

edit²:

I'm not sure if I like the method of disclosing people's gender here. Gendered profiles had their full name as their user name and/or a photography as their profile picture that indicates a gender.

So it's not only a gendered VS. non-gendered but also a anonymous VS. indentified individual comparison.

And apparantly we trust people more if we know more about their skills (insiders rank way higher than outsiders) and less about the person behind (pseudonym VS. name/photography).

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 3 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

We ass-u-me too much based on people's genders/photographs/ideas/etc., which taints our objectivity when assessing the quality of their code.

For a close example on Lemmy: people refusing to collaborate with "tankie" devs, with no further insight on whether the code is good or not.

There also used to be code licensed "not to be used for right wing purposes", and similar.

[–] Ava@beehaw.org 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's not an excellent example. If they refuse to collaborate with them, and also don't make any claims about the quality of code, then the claim that their objectivity in reviewing code is tainted doesn't hold.

[–] jarfil@beehaw.org 1 points 4 months ago

Their objectivity is preempted by a subjective evaluation, just like it would be by someone's appearance or any other perception other than the code itself.

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