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> 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 grap

> 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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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 11y ago
    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.
- V-2 11y ago
  Or maybe more experienced/open-source involved programmers have a stronger proclivity for choosing abstract user handles? There's no end to this guessing game, all they revealed was some correlation (and not a very strong one at that), and this by itself means next to nothing. Obligatory: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations
mattkrause 11y ago
It could be something like hobbyist vs. professional programming. I would bet that pull requests generated as part of someone's job are typically higher quality: they're more thoroughly used/tested before submission, the authors can spend more time on them, etc. These are more likely to be submitted from "work accounts", which can be deliberately vague (e.g., if shared) or just not fleshed out very well. It might be possible to flesh this out by looking at the domain names.

civilian 11y ago

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 11y ago
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 11y ago
  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.
V-2 11y ago
Or maybe more experienced/open-source involved programmers have a stronger proclivity for choosing abstract user handles? There's no end to this guessing game, all they revealed was some correlation (and not a very strong one at that), and this by itself means next to nothing. Obligatory: http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations http://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

mattkrause 11y ago

It could be something like hobbyist vs. professional programming. I would bet that pull requests generated as part of someone's job are typically higher quality: they're more thoroughly used/tested before submission, the authors can spend more time on them, etc. These are more likely to be submitted from "work accounts", which can be deliberately vague (e.g., if shared) or just not fleshed out very well. It might be possible to flesh this out by looking at the domain names.