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One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated. So you
by greentuna 9y ago
One thing I have noticed is that male engineers are intrinsically motivated but female engineers, even highly capable ones, are extrinsically motivated.
So you find very few female engineers in open source projects, under 3% by some estimates, although the percentage of female professional software engineers is much higher. Clearly this is not due to discrimination —- github doesn’t ask you your gender. So there must be some other explanation. When someone is intrinsically motivated (i.e., not motivated by salary alone) they are likely to be a better employee.
- ec109685 9y agoGitHub doesn’t ask for gender, yet you assume the 3% figure is accurate. Even if you do, it doesn’t make sense to correlate GitHub contributions with “intrinsic” motivation. You can still love to code but not want to contribute to Open Source. Also, what percentage of software engineers regularly contribute to a non-corporate sponsored GitHub open source project? I would bet it is a small number, which means you shouldn’t use it as a proxy to generalize for the industry and gender differences within it.