Matthew SkeltonMay 18, 2024

"Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. 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."

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/308716997_Gender_bias_in_open_source_Pull_request_acceptance_of_women_versus_men

🤬

Show threadטליה (לשון את) 
@matthewskelton
"To summarize this paper’s observations:
1. Women are more likely to have pull requests accepted than men.
2. Women continue to have high acceptance rates as they gain experience.
3. Women’s pull requests are less likely to serve an immediate project need.
4. Women’s changes are larger.
5. Women’s acceptance rates are higher across programming languages.
6. Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as women."
wow. just wow.
May 19, 2024 at 9:27amWeb
Show threadDavid ZaslavskyMay 19, 2024
@yuvalne @matthewskelton Oh I didn't get to the "immediate project need" part yet, that's interesting 👀
Show threadMatthew SkeltonMay 19, 2024

@diazona @yuvalne in other words, the contributions from women also include more stewardship and longer term codebase care 🌱

?

Show threadCat HicksMay 19, 2024
@matthewskelton @diazona @yuvalne I am cautious about that part, that's based on a fairly sparse selection of data and the operationalization is whether or not the PR is tagged to an issue; there are many potential explanations of that depending on how such things get labeled. This is notoriously messy and noisy data anyway so you can get into sample sizes where you need to be cautious about conclusions. This looks like an exploratory side finding for future work not a strong conclusion.
Show threadDavid ZaslavskyMay 19, 2024

@grimalkina @matthewskelton @yuvalne That makes a lot of sense. After reading the whole paper I'm also a little more hesitant about that conclusion.

Plus, anecdotally, in the open-source projects I contribute to, a significant fraction of issues get created to track long-term wishlist items, which probably shouldn't count as "immediate project needs". Conversely, many of what I'd consider immediate needs (like a new feature, compatibility with a new dependency version, CI failure, etc.) are addressed by someone just submitting a PR without any corresponding issue ever being created.

Speculation: addressing issues could indicate more of a collaborative approach, i.e. focusing your development efforts on fixes you expect will benefit others rather than something that might only matter to you, but I don't know if there's a good way to evaluate that hypothesis. 🤷

Show threadFranchescaMay 19, 2024
@yuvalne @matthewskelton as a senior software engineer who also happens to be a woman, I would love to be able to say I’m surprised at this 😅