
Gender bias in open source: Pull request acceptance by gender [Preprint] - jasonhoyt
https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/
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kriro
I like how this paper is constructed. They form a bunch of hypotheses and test
them and aren't afraid to be wrong. Rather refreshing since the typical papers
I read are more of the "here's our successful test" variety. I feel like a
supplementary qualitative analysis (code quality) would be helpful. My
personal hypothesis is that women self-select and the pool of female
contributes has a higher average skill than the pool of male contributors.

I have no evidence to back this up but by gut says that it's still socially
harder for women to become developers and as a result the ones that "survive"
tend to be better on average. While this is a bias I'd argue that the major
reason (cause) for the acceptance/rejection of pull requests is the quality of
said request which would argue against a bias in the acceptance. I'm not sure
how to phrase it well but in summary I think there's a social bias against
women in programming (as a career) but I suspect code quality is the main
cause of accept/reject decisions and there is no bias there.

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hamax
Was this flagged into obscurity while I was reading the paper? I can't find it
on the first five pages anymore. Pretty sad.

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stalled
There was a more successful repost 6 hours later that got some discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)

