GitHub Users Find Women's Code Better Than Men's — Until They Know Who Wrote It

http://www.bustle.com/articles/141667-github-users-find-womens-code-better-than-mens-until-they-know-who-wrote-it

With all the recent talk about women lagging behind in STEM fields, it may be tempting to assume that, whether due to biology or socialization, women are just not performing as well. But that would be wrong: The Github community actually approves more code by women... until they know it's by women. A new study published inPeerJfound that software developers on GitHub respond to contributions differently when they know there are women behind them.

The way GitHub works, developers can collaborate on one another's projects, and each project's creator can decide to accept or reject someone else's contribution. When the researchers looked at requests to contribute code, they found that about 79 percent of those by women and 75 percent of those by men were accepted. In fact, women's requests were approved more for all the top ten programming languages. But, of course, there was a catch.

GitHub users all have profiles, which can reveal varying amounts of information about them. Some include photos where their gender (or at least their perceived gender) is identifiable, while others don't, and some use their real names, while others create usernames that don't reveal their identities.

And here's the kicker: when women's genders were clear and their potential collaborators didn't already know them, their acceptance was suddenly lower than men's at 62.5 percent. So, basically, people judged the code they once considered superior as inferiorwhen they knew it was written by women.