Monday 7 March 2016

A study of 1.4 million computer programmers on GitHub suggests that women are better coders but face a persistent gender bias.

An analysis of pull requests, or users’ submissions of new code to the projects of other software developers, revealed that code written by women was accepted 78.6 percent of the time. For men, the figure was 74.6 percent. But when female coders did indicate their gender, they were far less likely to have their code accepted, with their approval rate plummeting to 62.5 percent. The authors say the difference in the rate of accepted requests is statistically significant. They go on to examine a range of hypotheses that might explain what they observed.

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