Communications of the ACM
Study Finds Gender Bias in Open Source Programming
A study by North Carolina State University researchers found that while women's contributions in open source software communities tend to be accepted more often than men's in general, they are rejected more frequently when a woman's gender is identifiable
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Although women's contributions in open source software communities tend to be accepted more often than men's in general, they are rejected more frequently when a woman's gender is identifiable, according to a new study by North Carolina State University (NCSU) researchers.
The assessment of more than 3 million pull requests from about 330,000 GitHub users--about 21,000 of whom were female--found 78.7% of women's pull requests were accepted, versus 74.6% for men. However, coders who could easily be identified as women based on their names or profile pictures had a 58% pull request acceptance rate, while identifiable men had a 61% rate.
In addition, the researchers found women programmers with gender-neutral profiles had a higher acceptance rate than any other group, including their male equivalents.
"Our results indicate that gender bias does exist in open source programming," says NCSU professor Emerson Murphy-Hill.
From NCSU News
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