
Before You Get Too Excited About That GitHub Study - lladnar
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/
======
brighteyes
This study, and the news articles about it, say a lot more about _attitudes
towards_ software developers, than it does about software developers
themselves.

And those attitudes are disturbing. They describe the industry as a terrible,
sexist place, even though the actual study shows the exact opposite.

This isn't just insulting to us software engineers, which it definitely is.
It's also making the problem worse. Why should women be interested to join a
field that is described as horrible to them?

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BogusIKnow
1\. "Our analysis (..) shows that women are harder on other women than they
are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on women.”

2\. Not peer reviewed.

3\. The confidence intervals may overlap.

4\. Graphs all have non zero base lines.

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Analemma_
I'm usually the first person fawning over any new SSC post, but by his own
admission here he's just regurgitating the points from the original HN thread
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)).
Putting too much stock in this post is kind of "training on your validation
data", as it were.

~~~
parennoob
He's also doing the yeoman job of pointing out how rabidly the media will
seize upon this sort of study (which a lot of people have identified as having
serious flaws) and put up broadly general headlines that "fit the narrative",
like this one:

"Suck It Dudes. Science Proves Women Are Better Coders."
([http://gizmodo.com/suck-it-dudes-science-proves-women-are-
be...](http://gizmodo.com/suck-it-dudes-science-proves-women-are-better-
coders-1758825800))

I mean, I know that Gizmodo is not exactly the pinnacle of responsible
journalism, but as mentioned in the article, the Guardian, the BBC, and
Business Insider are not doing much better.

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chroma
Hmm... odd. Despite a decent number of upvotes, my earlier submission of this
link[1] never made it to the front page. I thought it was flagged down by
users, but maybe not?

Edit (after downvotes): Jeez, I was just curious, not accusing.

1\.
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092049](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11092049)

------
kaonashi
What the world really needs is more dudes taking the devil's advocate position
on sexism issues.

~~~
tmalsburg2
What a lazy comment. I recommend looking at the actual study [1]. It is
reported as showing that male programmers are incompetent and misogynist.
However, when you look at the data (especially Fig. 5 on page 15) you'll find
that this claim is baseless. Male outsiders showed the exact same drop in
acceptance rates when their avatar was gendered as women outsiders did. No
evidence for gender bias.

Looking at the data for insiders (left part of Fig. 5), you have evidence that
male insiders have lower PR acceptance rates when their avatar was gendered
but women insiders don't. Applying the authors' logic you would have to
conclude that tech is biased against men, which is nonsense and which
illustrates that the reasoning used in this study isn't sound.

[1]
[https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf)

Edit: Down voting instead of responding is lazy, too.

