Gender bias acts as big hurdle for female coders in software industry

They wanted to see if women coders were reaping the benefits of reverse gender bias, perhaps getting more approvals in efforts to promote diversity-instead, they found the opposite. They matched coders with their code contributions, or “pull requests” as they are called on GitHub, a crowdsourcing platform used by 12 million developers to contribute code to open-source software-building projects. However, researchers found that pull requests written by women were accepted at, “a higher rate than code written by men, but only if the gender was not disclosed”.

However, results supported the contrary, as they discovered that code from women is accepted at a higher rate, 78.6 percent then from men, that is 74.6 percent. Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.

The results of the study showed that Google had a slight discrimination against the fake female profiles that were made for the research.

One of the main findings in the study was that women on Github were more competent than their male counterparts.

“The software industry (and, in the end, the public) is missing an opportunity when women are excluded, whatever the reason for that exclusion.”, said Emerson Murphy-Hill, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, one of the co-authors of this study. When the gender is revealed, the acceptance rate of the women coders falls below the acceptance rate of the men. The catch-there’s always a catch-is that this only happens when the woman’s gender is hidden. During their resarch, the team analysed of the behaviour of over a million users of Github, a code-sharing website where users can collaborate, post their work, and have others give them feedback.

However those requests, urgent or otherwise, are only accepted when the women don’t outright display their gender.

Still, we have to go back to the operative word when referring to the study – gender-blind. On GitHub, women’s contributions actually outnumber men’s-as long as they don’t actually identify themselves as women. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong, ‘ the paper noted.

Just 16 percent of Facebook’s tech staff and 18 percent of Google’s are women according to figures released in 2015.

Eek. So let’s get this straight: Women are better coders, and people recognize that, but only if nobody knows they’re women?