
Female coders are rated more highly than men, when nobody knows they're women - gpresot
http://qz.com/615899/female-coders-are-rated-more-highly-than-men-except-when-people-know-theyre-women/
======
Yver
Rehash of this previous submission:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11074587)

The drop in pull request acceptance from gender-neutral to gendered is worse
for men than for women. (Figure 5) Anyone can cherry-pick parts of that
preprint to support their argument.

~~~
bunnymancer
Apart from that it isn't. As Figure 5 shows. But ok..

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RogerL
This is why I do not believe people when they say "I hire people solely on the
basis of ability" as an argument against making any efforts towards equality
or equal representation.

I don't think (many) people are willfully biased, but every study bears out
that bias exists. Make selection blind to race, sex, etc., and the results are
different. Orchestras switched to blind interviews and hiring profiles changed
dramatically. Suddenly females and minorities were rated higher and got more
job offers.

Its sad, but true, that we have this unconscious bias and we need to fix it. I
don't discount the conscious biases that clearly exist, I'm just saying a
claim of "I'm not biased, my hiring is fair" needs to be backed up with data,
not assertions.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
I guess that's why, in youth orchestra contests, the judges sit behind a
barrier when auditioning and making their notes.

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gpresot
The results seem reasonable to me: with 90-95% of coders being male, that
means that this group has probably a wide distribution curve in terms of
skills. The group of female coders probably has a narrower curve and likely
skewed towards "good" (i.e. gifted and truly passionate about coding).

~~~
Mithaldu
That is exactly what their study concludes:

"One explanation is survivorship bias: [...] Another explanation is self-
selection bias: [...] Yet another explanation is that women are held to higher
performance standards than men [...]"

Or in other words: Women who stay long enough to end up submitting PRs submit
higher quality code, while the much bigger population of men, under much less
social pressure, has a more well-distributed quality curve; and even women who
get this far are biased against if their gender is known.

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api
I've had one female coder tell me she's picked gender-ambiguous names and
doesn't show her pic online for this reason. Only once she's proven her
ability does she reveal her gender.

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MollyR
From Kon_air in the other discussion thread.

And then you discover in Questions Section; "Our analysis (not in this paper
-- we've cut a lot out to keep it crisp) shows that women are harder on other
women than they are on men. Men are harder on other men than they are on
women." [https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-
gen...](https://peerj.com/questions/2002-do-you-have-data-on-the-gen..).

------
_wdh
The research paper is here if anyone is interested:
[https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf](https://peerj.com/preprints/1733.pdf)

