The BBC is running an interesting story today about a new study coming out that suggests that women write better code than men. The study – conducted by Comp Sci Department researchers at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and North Carolina State University – has yet to be scrutinized via peer review, but the initial data points to some interesting possibilities as well as some weary, familiar indications of gender-bias.
Looking at the code-pull habits of 1.4 million gender-identifiable Github users , the data indicates “that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men.” But this was only true when the individual requesting a code pull could not be identified as male or female. Sadly and predictably, once a users gender was identifiable, women’s code got less respect:
“Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men. Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.” [Source]
We are looking forward to more about this study going forward!