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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

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 11y ago
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.

luso_brazilian 11y ago

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.