
BBC admits its viral “women write better code” story was fake news - sakabaro
https://hequal.wordpress.com/2016/12/28/bbc-admits-its-viral-women-write-better-code-story-was-fake-news/
======
caminante
Original article [0].

Here's the BBC's analysis of the complaint [1].

[0]
[http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439](http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439)

[1] [http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-
reports/ecu/womenwriteb...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints/comp-
reports/ecu/womenwritebettercode)

~~~
ec109685
Here's the original HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)

------
Grustaf
The hequal article is pretty bad, and at least as biased as the BBC one, but
they are at least right in their conclusion.

I haven't ready the study itself, so it might be the BBC that misunderstands
things:

1\. Using "pull request acceptance rate" as a proxy for "code quality" is
highly dubious. It might equally well indicate that their PRs are more
relevant, smaller and hence easier to review, more basic or any number of
things.

Since we are looking at a ratio, the gap could also be in the numerator. Maybe
men are just more likely to submit PRs, for a given skill level. Many people
claim that female developers are being put down by their peers, so it would be
natural if they are more hesitant to file a PR, only doing so when they are
certain it's good. Etc.

2\. The findings are based on a subset of total pull requests, namely those
with users whose gender can be identified one way or another. Clearly the
slight gender gap could just as well lie here, for example "skilled female
developers are more likely than unskilled ones to be show their gender on
Google+, compared to the ratio for men".

Also, since there is such an enormous difference between the absolute number
of male and female developers (probably at least an order of magnitude), it's
quite surprising that the gap here is only a couple of percentage points.
Given that difference, it's easy to imagine lots of potential reasons for the
small bias.

------
eridius
This site appears to be a mens rights site, pretending it's "egalitarian" when
it's anything but. Just skimming both this article and the About page, it's
pretty strongly insulting feminism and dismissing their complaints, while at
the same time complaining about misandry and '"genuine" discrimination'.

------
chtfn
Soooo this article challenges the original article's validity with stuff like:

> There are far more male users on GitHub then one could argue that men are in
> fact far better at coding because far more are actually doing it and many
> women are missing in action. Perhaps the small number of women who get
> involved are marginally better on average, but they would still be vastly
> outnumbered by men who are equally or more capable

How is this more valid? They complain that the study is not scientifically
peer-reviewed (which is fair enough, I don't challenge that) and then come up
with this dodgy analysis? Gee they sound stupid.

~~~
guitarbill
This could be valid with any number of probability distributions.

Comparing two populations (in the statistical sense) is tricky, especially if
you have a huge difference between them. Then you can make some really weird
claims, especially by omission.

What does "women write better code" mean? It could mean any number of things.
Some I thought of:

* On average, a woman will write better code than a man. This is saying the mean of the "woman code quality" distribution is higher than that of the "man code quality" distribution. But again this metric is problematic without standard deviation. Because if there are simply more men than women who code, you still have a better chance at hiring a man who codes better than average if you can exclude the lower part through some bound (e.g. basic aptitude tests or interview), especially for long-tail distributions.

* Woman as a whole group write better code. I don't even know what this might mean, but maybe they aren't so obsessed about writing shitty javascript frameworks. Could be interesting for a psychologist. I just made a few things up for the sake of an example explanation: E.g. that the "women" population prefers to code on an existing project vs alone (i.e. new project), that that population prefers projects with a more social structure and therefore pull requests so through smoother because everybody know everyone, etc.

So you really can't say anything for sure without the data, but you can make
up click-bait-y articles. Note how there are conveniently no graphs in the
article, just a picture of a redheaded women looking at a laptop.

------
andrewclunn
There's no such thing as an objective source. Advertisement, journalism,
propaganda... they all blend together. It really shouldn't be shocking that so
many are retreating into their own echo chambers. What's the point of trying
to find a reputable source of news, when none of them are?

~~~
frozenport
Because some of them are? And some of them retract their mistakes?

~~~
andrewclunn
The post linked goes into depth as to why this retraction is too little too
late. Having no filter process that prevents obvious click bait nonsense, with
a retraction a year later is not worth praising. Best to internalize some
skepticism about all "news" and question studies "especially of the gray
science variety." Being bothered because it's easy to label outlets with
biases you don't like, while forgiving those you do, is just human nature, and
I'd wager at the root of why my comment keeps fluctuating wildly as to its
rating.

------
John23832
Aside from the story, I really do think that women write better code.

I think it stems from society's tendency to be overly critical of women and
the things that they do. If an external force is hypercritical of you, then
most people would internalize it. I think this logically leads to better
outcomes in things that require critique, like code.

Now this idea has much farther reaching (and more negative) consequences for
women imo, but I think it applies here.

~~~
x1798DE
"Women write better code" seems like an ill-defined statement to me, even
assuming you agree on "better" code. Does that mean that the average woman
writes code better than the average man? Does it mean that the average
"programmer" woman writes code better than the average "programmer" man? Is
there anything in there about the the variance in female or male programmer
ability? There are a huge number of metrics that would fit the statement, some
of which may be true and some may not be true, and many of which might have
different conclusions about how "actionable" that information is.

