
Pull request acceptance of women versus men - schmichael
https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/
======
daenz
Their method of identifying genders is to use a data source of Github user
emails and cross reference those with a Google+ account. Then they scrape the
Google+ account and attempt and try to automatically determine the gender.
Using this method, they are able to identify only 35% of the users involved in
these PRs.

I find this suspect, because, anecdotally, I can look almost any author of a
PR and determine their gender to a high degree of certainty. Probably well
over 90% of the time, just from their name + profile picture + handle. Try it
for yourself..look at the latest commits on a random project and see how
obvious the genders are most of the time.

So the claim that "when a woman is identifiable, PRs are merged less" is
totally suspect, because they themselves can only identify the genders of a
small percentage relative to what a normal human can identify. If people can
identify the genders way more often and accurately, then the claim being made
is bogus. Perhaps there is a correlation of strongly signalling your gender
(to the point where an inaccurate method of gender-identification has no
problem) to being a below average developer.

~~~
mucker
Not to mention it doesn't account for biological sex.

~~~
ianremsen
This is irrelevant, I think.

~~~
mucker
You thinking it does not magically make it so.

~~~
ianremsen
I'd like to hear your reasoning for why it's relevant enough to have added
value to the results.

------
zamalek

               Open     Closed   Merged     Merge Rate  95% Confidence Interval
        Women  8,216    21,890   111,011    78.6%       [78.45%, 78.87%]
        Men    150,248  591,785  2,181,517  74.6%       [74.56%, 74.67%]
    

_> The hypothesis is not only false, but it is in the opposite direction than
expected; women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate
than men! This difference is statistically significant (p < .001)._

Many hypothesis are discussed in an attempt to explain this and the paper is
well worth the read. Thanks to a documented GitHub API this stuff gets quite
scientifically correct - everything is backed up with real-world data.

More quotes:

> To summarize this paper’s observations:

> 1\. Women are more likely to have pull requests accepted than men.

> 2\. Women continue to have high acceptance rates as they gain experience.

> 3\. Women’s pull requests are less likely to serve an immediate project
> need.

> 4\. Women’s changes are larger.

> 5\. Women’s acceptance rates are higher across programming languages.

> 6\. Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are
> identifiable as women.

~~~
tyingq
Except, later....

 _" For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates
are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their
gender is identifiable."_

~~~
KON_Air
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-gender-of-
the-users-that/#annotation-2002-replies)

~~~
AlisdairO
Good grief. You'd think, considering the near constant criticism of men in
technology for gender bias, that fact might have warranted a mention as an
aside at least.

~~~
geofft
Most of the even-half-informed criticism I see is about _systems_ for gender
bias, and specifically acknowledges that people regardless of gender who have
been brought up in a world with biases have internalized those biases.

As a man in technology, I can't say I've ever felt _personally_ attacked for
gender bias.

~~~
AlisdairO
I guess it depends on how you look at it. When I see phrases like "boy's club"
(not in this paper), it implies to me that there's a group of men who work
(consciously or unconsciously) to keep women out. I'm aware that it's not at
all an uncommon finding that women are pretty hard on other women, yet I think
that receives very little play in the popular media.

Perhaps I do take it too personally - I do my very best to be fair and
reasonable with all my fellows, whatever their various deviations (or not)
from the industry norm might be. It's upsetting to me to be tarred with this
guilt-by-association. I find it particularly disheartening in the venue of
OSS: I've always viewed it as a truly fantastic collective charitable effort,
yet lately it seems to be getting depicted more and more as some kind of
refuge for white men to exclude everyone else.

~~~
reubeniv
I feel the same guilt, I'm a student - I'm excluded from scholarships, meetups
and career events because of my gender, that plus the regular criticism aimed
at the industry - I feel ashamed every time I'm asked to fill out an equality
form. I don't know what to do about it.

~~~
eanzenberg
Don't let it effect you? Or, "I look to a day when people will not be judged
by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" can be
applied to sex and any other identifiable trait as well.

------
noddingham
The summary seems to be all positive regarding women's contributions except
for the last one:

"Women have lower acceptance rates as outsiders when they are identifiable as
women.".

Looking at the data, they say that the acceptance rate for female outsiders is
62.5%, but they don't say what it is for men. Looking at the chart it looks
like ~63.5%. And acceptance rates for both genders drop by >=10% going from
non-gendered to gendered. Can we infer then that the bias is somewhat across
the board for pull requests from easily gendered users?

~~~
notatoad
it looks like the criteria for determining gender is to pull it from a google+
profile that shares an email address with the github account, and is not using
any information from the github profile.

It seems likely to me that the bias here is gmail users versus non-gmail
(corporate domain?) users.

~~~
astine
That's incorrect. The study identified the gender of the Github users twice.
They got their 'canonical' gender for users using your method (and removed
from their sample users who could not be identified with this method,) but
later to figure out whether a user's gender was identifiable, they used the
Github user's own profile.

Non-Google+ users were not analyzed at all. That could possibly still
influence the results, but not the way you are suggesting.

------
4bpp
Given that it seems like they analysed real-world data rather than producing
synthetic experiments, I wouldn't put too much stock in the findings. For
instance, in a hypothetical world where all businesses contributing to Github
projects are perfectly sexist, only ever assign male coders to core
engineering and only ever assign female coders to UX design, UX design is
intrinsically more controversial and Github maintainerers accept patches
purely on the degree of public support for their contents, one would expect a
far lower degree of acceptance for patches from identifiable (as businesses
presumably make their workers operate under real-name accounts) female
accounts without this containing any signal about sexism on the Github side.

A better methodology for a study like this would be to identify a number of
people planning to make sporadic contributions to projects they have no
connection to and making them submit the pull requests under fresh fictional
profiles with randomised gender. This way, any irrelevant correlations between
the kind of pull request being made and the requesting party being
identifiable as female would be eliminated.

~~~
johnhess
As the article itself states:

> Experiments and retrospective field studies each have advantages. The
> advantage of experiments is that they can more confidently infer cause and
> effect by isolating gender as the predictor variable. The advantage of
> retrospective field studies is that they tend to have higher ecological
> validity because they are conducted in real-world situations. In this paper,
> we use a retrospective field study as a first step to quantify the effect of
> gender bias in open source.

The research is presented in context, an important and valid context, too. At
the end, they discuss potential explanations and never go so far as to say
"And all of this is clearly because ______".

A controlled study would be a great followup, but I'd sure put stock in these
compelling and well documented findings.

------
gregdoesit
> _Women’s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles,
> but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable_

What is also true from the graphs, but the author does not emphasize is this:
_Men 's acceptance rates are 69%, but drop to 64% when the gender is
identifiable._

This is taken from figure 5. So in general, it seems the acceptance rate drops
in both cases, as soon as the gender is identifyable. I do wonder why this is?
The two just don't add up. It seems that the type of PRs that the authors have
maanged to have the gender identified, simply have _much_ lower acceptance
rates.

~~~
civilian
Maybe, when you reveal things about yourself, people are more likely to find
things they dislike about you. Having a recognizable gender on github would
often include things like: a picture (your face is ugly!), your name (your
ethnicity sucks!), your country (your country sucks!), your place of work
(your company sucks!) and maybe your side project blog (your side projects are
stupid!).

~~~
gregdoesit
That is a possible explanation. Naively I would have thought the opposite -
the more you know about someone, the more likely you accept their PR. But this
is a statistically wide enough gap for both cases, and also a statistically
more significant drop in acceptance of women's PRs.

~~~
noddingham
I would say "the more you know about someone like you"...

To me that would correlate with other studies based on first impressions,
hiring, etc., where we sometimes subconsciously seek out people like us.
Similar to another comment, giving _any_ information about you allows me to
put you in a box I have created, whether positive or negative.

------
wbhart
There's a large drop for both men and women between project outsiders who do
not identify a gender on GitHub and those that do. So that's one very clear
effect. If you want to have your contributions accepted on GitHub, male or
female, and you are an outsider, do not identify yourself.

However, it was only possible to identify the gender of about a third of
people overall from publicly available information.

So for the conclusions of the study to be valid, one must eliminate the
possibility that there is a gender imbalance in those whose gender is able to
be identified by publicly available information (which would not represent
discrimination, since that information is self-reported). Until one can
eliminate this, one may not be measuring discrimination, but effectively just
a correlation between availability of public information on programmers and
their skill level.

Moreover, it looks like the gender information was entirely constructed from
Google+. Yet there is no information on what percentage of users' of each
gender actually had Google+ pages. This is extremely relevant to the
conclusions as there could also be correlations with the usage of Google+ by
programmers of a certain skill and gender.

------
Rangi42
> Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user profiles with email addresses, we were able to
> identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of them as men or women through their public
> Google+ profiles.

I wonder if there's a gender bias with regard to making your Google+ profile
public (or having one in the first place).

~~~
groby_b
I also wonder how they actually verified the public G+ profiles. I know that a
significant number of women in my circle of acquaintances deliberately flag
themselves as male.

~~~
markus2012
I randomly lie about my gender, age, and anything that could be used to
identify me. I learned this from others, and have also encourage my
spouse/children/etc. to do the same (which they seem to do).

There is no compelling reason for me to provide any real information about
myself online.

------
sergiotapia
>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.

------
iLoch
I think we should be very careful how we choose to interpret the results here.
There are a lot of unknowns and variables presented in the paper (how they're
determining gender, for example.)

I'm not sure there's enough data here to create an understanding about the
relationship between merge rate and gender. Various external issues could be
the cause of the difference (I don't believe either gender is more capable) -
for example (not sure if this is true, but it portrays how these stats could
be skewed): In India, there's a higher incentive to be recognized in the
community because competition is stiffer, so more people submit PRs. In this
case, people who generally wouldn't submit a PR because of their lack of
expertise are now submitting PRs on the chance that it may get accepted. The
result is a greater number of PRs with lower quality.

These are the effects of having a global community. There are _so many_
external factors I don't really think we can determine much of anything from
these results. It's an interesting analysis regardless though.

------
minimaxir
> _Specifically, we extract users’ email addresses from GHTorrent, look up
> that email address on the Google+ social network, then, if that user has a
> profile, extract gender information from these users’ profiles._

I was curious so I looked up the Google+ API
([https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/](https://developers.google.com/+/web/api/rest/))
and I do not see an "email lookup" endpoint. You can only search for generic
information in public profiles. Searching for my own email, which is public in
Google+, using that particular endpoint yielded no results.

I call shennanigans that _1 /3_ of the accounts in the dataset had
discoverable profiles this way, and they were retrieved in a manner that is
acceptable by Google.

~~~
Xorlev
You can find a G+ profile for anyone by searching an email in your Gmail
search. Unsure if that's the route they'd taken.

~~~
minimaxir
Since that scraping of millions of users would have to be automated, it
definitely falls into the issue why Google would allow that behavior.

------
cjensen
To me, the real horror show is the 1:18 ratio between contributors who
publicly identify themselves as a Woman and contributors who publicly identify
themselves as a Man[1].

There's so many hypotheses one could make about that (ratios among software
engineers in general, differing interest in programming as a hobby beyond
work, the confrontational culture among projects, hiding ones identity to
avoid creeps, etc). It's a good start and we could really use further
research.

[1] Sorry that's worded so awkwardly, but it's hard to phrase that without
implying something unsupported by this particular data.

~~~
sheepmullet
> To me, the real horror show is the 1:18 ratio between contributors who
> publicly identify themselves as a Woman and contributors who publicly
> identify themselves as a Man[1].

To me, comments like yours highlight the toxic nature of the software
industry.

It is an expectation in software dev that we do most of our learning and
development on our own time and part time work is generally frowned upon.
GitHub accounts and side projects are becoming a larger part of interview
processes.

How do you think this looks to prospective female employees? Basically it
gives the impression that they have to be prepared to work 45-50 hours a week
in order to be competitive.

This isn't compatible with many women's focus on flexible work for when they
have children.

Notice that none of this is inherent to software development. Companies could
provide proper on the job learning and development. Companies could be more
open to part time work. Companies could use better proxies for developer skill
than personal contributions to GitHub.

~~~
cjensen
I think you are reading stuff into my comment that I simply did not say or
imply; worse, the things you think I said you describe as "toxic"!

I don't think side projects are necessary to further your career, and it's
been 20 years since I worked on one myself.

You do make good points that an individual may not have the opportunity to
engage in a side project for reasons not related to competence. Your
hypothesis that the hardship faced by many women once they have children may
contribute to the statistic is well-worth further investigation -- like I
said, there's many possible hypotheses to investigate, and more than one
factor may contribute to the overall outcome. As an interviewer, I've only
once seen an outside project on a resume and I considered it a plus; that may
have been a mistake on my part.

------
BinaryIdiot
Remember this is not peered reviewed. Others haven't looked at it to decide if
it had proper controls, good enough samples, or even valid data. So take this
with a grain of salt until it's properly peered reviewed.

I almost wonder if it's worse to publish non-peered-reviewed research or not.
I mean it could be great if it's solid research but if there are flaws (even
minor) it could undermine other studies, change people's minds, etc.

------
astine

        We considered a GitHub profile as gender neutral if all of the following conditions were met:
        - an identicon (rather than a profile image) was used,
        - the gender inference tool output a ’unknown’ for the user’s login name and display name, and
        - none of the panelists indicated that they could identify the user’s gender.
        Across both panels, panelists inspected 3000 profiles of roughly equal numbers of women and men.
    

Given that acceptance rates dropped for both men and women when this method
determined that a user was not gender-neutral, I wonder if use of a profile
picture or real name is the real killer here. Perhaps the kind of person to
include identifying information in their Github profile is less likely to have
good pull requests? More likely, perhaps having any identifying information at
all gives people an excuse to reject your pull requests? That would explain
why there was a drop for both sexes but a slightly stronger one for women. If
you are identifiable from your profile image or name, people are more likely
to reject your PR on the bases of your ethnicity, appearance, religion, or
gender, with gender being only a part of the effect.

~~~
kuschku
> Perhaps the kind of person to include identifying information in their
> Github profile is less likely to have good pull requests?

Probably commercial employees?

------
mark-ruwt
There's a lot in here, and many of the findings will be different than one
would expect from the title.

If you don't have much time, skip to the "Discussion" section on pages 16 and
17.

------
belorn
_" For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates
are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their
gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not
as strong."_

Why leave out an exact number for men whose gender is identifiable?

------
jongraehl
For regular contributors, women appear* to accept a man's work (slightly) more
than they will a woman's, and men appear to accept a woman's work more than
they will a man's. Since there are more men than women, this means that on the
whole women are privileged.

* appear: maybe men or women have a different internal bar for how polished they'll make a pull request (how afraid they are of rejection, etc). the study looks at profiles that are closeted vs out as a gender. If you reveal gender on purpose, this tells us something about you, presumably, but for convenience the difference between closeted and out is taken to signify "bias against [out] men/women". Much of this is not statistically significant, probably (study doesn't give enough info, and suspiciously did an "insider" vs "outsider" analysis rather than a pooled analysis, suggesting they didn't like what they found until they split into two pools).

For unsolicited outside contributions, closeted men seem to get rejected more
than closeted women (men's bar is lower?). Out men get rejected more than
closeted men or women. Out women get rejected more than closeted men or women.
The key is: for this category, people appear to be _less_ biased against out
men than out women (but somehow people prefer contributions from hidden-gender
folks?).

Anyway, this is interesting stuff but I'm not sure what to take from it. I do
expect more low-quality outside-team submissions from men than women, and I
might judge them unfairly if they were out men, but this is just a random
hunch and I doubt it would affect me much (probably I wouldn't notice).

------
Sir_Substance
Remember when people on the internet werent pushed towards using real names?
Gender bias didn't exist because only people you told knew your gender. Such
gay times they were!

~~~
jacalata
It was so awesome when you were fine if you either were male or knew enough to
pretend to be male!

~~~
Sir_Substance
If that was how it was for you, you were hanging out in a pretty crummy part
of the internet, which is really sad considering how easy it is to find a
different part. You missed out on some quality times.

~~~
jacalata
That is a completely different argument to the one you made originally - "some
parts of the internet weren't sexist" vs "people weren't sexist because they
couldn't figure out your gender" (which is the one I disagreed with")

------
merb
I will never get such articles? Why does somebody need to know of which gender
is somebody?

People should ALWYAYS be measured by their performance not by their gender.

~~~
sp332
When you're contributing to a project, performance is only one important
thing. It also matters whether you are furthering the goals of the project,
communicating well with the other members, and even if you have the social
skills to lead a project.

~~~
douche
Coming soon: If you possess personal political, social, religious and
philosophical views deemed acceptable by the project.

------
luso_brazilian
Here is one (IMO) much more complete abstract (not to call it tl:dr) that
covers the main hypothesis, and all the variables studied

 _Our main research question was: to what extent does gender bias exist among
people who judge GitHub pull requests?

To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men
and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub,
then investigated why differences might exist.

We extract users' email addresses from GHTorrent, look up that email address
on the Google+ social network, then, if that user has a profile, extract
gender information from these users' profiles. Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user
profiles with email addresses, we were able to identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of
them as men or women through their public Google+ profiles.

== Results ==

Are women's pull requests less likely to be accepted? The hypothesis is not
only false, but it is in the opposite direction than expected; women tend to
have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men!

== Do women's pull request acceptance rates start low and increase over time?
==

[B]etween 1 and 64 pull requests, women's higher acceptance rate remains.
Thus, the evidence casts doubt on our hypothesis.

== Are women making pull requests that are more needed? ==

[T]he result suggests that women's increased success rate is not explained by
making more immediately needed pull requests.

== Are women making smaller changes? ==

(...) Women make pull requests that add and remove more lines of code, modify
more files, and contain more commits.

== Are women's pull requests more successful when contributing code? ==

(For instance, changes to HTML could be more likely to be accepted than
changes to C code, and if women are more likely to change HTML)

[W]omen's acceptance rates dominate over men's for every programming language
in the top ten, to various degrees

== Is a woman’s pull request accepted more often because she appears to be a
woman? ==

For insiders, we observe little evidence of bias when we compare women with
gender neutral profiles and women with gendered profiles, since both have
about equivalent acceptance rates.

For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women’s acceptance rates are
71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their
gender is identifiable. There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not
as strong.

Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall (as we reported
earlier), but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they
have a lower acceptance rate than men._

I hope that helps those who won't read the whole paper but feel the need to
comment on it.

~~~
luso_brazilian
My opinion on the paper is that the abstract doesn't reflect adequately the
content of the paper.

The last assertion, that the "results suggest that although women on GitHub
may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless" seems to
indicate that the paper results didn't confirmed the desired hypothesis but
that there was need to highlight any incidence of gender bias anyway.

The conclusion that there is _gender bias_ on the acceptance of pull requests
by women while outsiders (as opposed on women as insiders or men in general)
seems to be excessive sub-categorization in order to find a supporting result
as the hypothesis doesn't hold for women as whole nor for the subcategory of
identifiable women.

It is a very good result, demonstrating that, at least for something so
unrelated to the average workplace as Github repositories can be (being in
general remote, voluntary and more likely than not to liberal in tendencies
due to the FLOSS philosophy), that an useful line of code is an useful line of
code, regardless of who wrote it.

------
melted
Sigh. Authors are unaware of Simpson's paradox. Such analyses are meaningless
if you don't control for such obvious factors as the distributions of projects
people of different genders choose to contribute to. See the classic college
admissions bias study to understand why:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox)

~~~
dang
You have a good point, but you've used the format of a middlebrow dismissal to
express it—i.e. acting like others don't know something well-known, and
snarking about it. That makes it a bad HN comment even if you're right. A
better HN comment would bring up the issue neutrally and then either examine
the OP to see how it deals with it, or ask a question about how it does.

~~~
V-2
Grandparent, you should have said something along the lines of "authors didn't
give an indication of knowing the Simpson's paradox even though their paper
was a great opportunity to do so". Or hear from forum lawyers :)

------
cushychicken
A good start is to call out misogyny when you see it, online or anywhere else.

This is disappointingly rare, in my experience.

Edit: what a shotgun blast of downvotes and straw men. People are lining up to
say all sorts of utter bullshit. For example:

* "Where does this indicate misogyny?"

* "The paper is about GitHub, which has a reputation for the opposite."

* "A good start is to stop calling things misogyny just because you're bad at reading statistics."

* "Of course it's important to recognize when it's actual misogyny and not just disagreement with the code."

The paper's findings are clear as a fucking bell: women have equal acceptance
of pull requests, except when the pull request obviously comes from a woman.
Fucking TEXTBOOK misogyny, and you're an idiotic trog if you don't think so.
(Looking RIGHT AT YOU here, pluma.)

~~~
Zikes
However rare it might be, the devastating affects of false positives make this
a terrible idea. Just ask Tim Hunt, Matt Taylor, or the men targeted by
"donglegate".

~~~
mjb394
Anti-sexist reactions are very rare compared to instances of sexist behavior
in my experience. If anti-sexist behavior was as rampant and casual as sexist
behavior, those kind of blowups wouldn't happen.

~~~
Zikes
There are only two appropriate ways to handle it: if the offense is not
egregious, address the incident with the offender in private. If the offense
is egregious, or if you do not feel comfortable enough to discuss it with the
offender, then you should report it to whatever authority figures are
responsible for the context of the incident.

"Calling out" the behavior consistently creates vigilantism, and puts an
unfair burden on the accused. In instances of sexism I have never, _ever_ seen
the accused treated as "innocent until proven guilty" in the eyes of the
online hate mobs.

Tim Hunt's experience was bad enough that he admitted to thoughts of suicide.
This is a man fully respected in his field and has a knighthood, but still had
difficulty facing the onslaught of hatred.

------
tomjen3
Can we please try not to make the comments ending up in a giant cluster-fuck,
despite how passionate we feel about the subject?

~~~
Analemma_
You must be new here.

~~~
booop
Well, his account is 1937 days older than yours.

~~~
ashi
It is a common expression suggesting one isn't familiar with the ways of the
site/community. You know, for humour.

------
mucker
The abstract, despite the clear results, is written in the most hostile manner
possible.

~~~
jcoffland
You must be easily offended. I did not find it hostile.

~~~
pluma
I think the proper idiom is "pouring gasoline on the fire". Especially
considering the authors say they intentionally cut the analysis "to keep it
crisp" when the analysis actually disagreed with the spirit of the abstract.

~~~
mucker
Exactly. The title intentionally conflicts with the theme.

------
jsharf
>Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted
more often than men's. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they
are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may
be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

If gender isn't identifiable, why is it surprising at all that women have a
higher acceptance rate? This is really annoying me, anyone else notice this?

~~~
kuschku
A higher rate than men is unexpected – if women and men were equally
qualified, you’d expect the same ratio for men and women.

------
kstrauser
I got to

> Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent
> overall

and stopped. No. Just, no. I'm inclined to disbelieve any study that claims
one gender is better at programming than other, and that claim makes me
automatically dismiss the rest of its conclusions.

~~~
themagician
See, I'm inclined to believe it. If for no other reason than it just seems
intuitive. Women who go into technology know it's an uphill battle. They work
that much harder and honestly I'd _expect_ their work to be better, on
average, particularly for open source projects because they are genuinely
interested in improving the code. They always have to contend with the
thought, "Will people reject this because I'm a woman? Better make sure it's
as good as it possibly can be so they can't reject it based on that."

~~~
dudul
Not sure I understand. So men in OSS are not _genuinely_ interested in
improving the code?

~~~
larsiusprime
The argument seems to be mathematical, not categorical, this is what I think
is being claimed -- "there are many more men on github than women, thus there
is stronger selection pressures on the women who are on github. Whether men
are more or less competent than women IN GENERAL is a separate question from
which is, _on average_ the more competent sub-population on github."

~~~
themagician
I was trying to find a way to articulate this and failing. This was my
intended meaning.

