An anonymous reader writes:
Remember that story about how women "get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they're women)." The study actually showed that men also had their code accepted more often when their gender wasn't known, according to Tech In Asia -- and more importantly, the lower acceptance rates (for both men and women) applied mostly to code submitters from outside the GitHub community. "Among insiders, there's no evidence of discrimination against women. In fact, the reverse is true: women who are on the inside and whose genders are easy to discern get more of their code approved, and to a statistically significant degree."
Eight months after the story ran, the BBC finally re-wrote their original headline ("Women write better code, study suggests") and added the crucial detail that acceptance rates for women fell "if they were not regulars on the service and were identified by their gender."
Re:Relationship
By AmiMoJo
•
2016-Dec-31 14:49
• Score: 4, Interesting
• Thread
And that is exactly what you would expect. People tend to be open minded when they don't know anything about a person. Once they know enough to categorize them, all the biases creep in. Then as they get to know them, they start to see them as individuals again.
Re:People of all genders should team up ...
By AmiMoJo
•
2016-Dec-31 14:54
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
Because it's flamebait. It's got everything - gender, hipsters and millennials, wise older workers, leftists, claiming other people's issues aren't real... It could easily have been copy/pasted from the /. troll playbook.
I hope it's a sign that people are finally getting fed up with the denials and moaning about it all being a non-issue, and are actually interested in commenting on the story. There is an interesting story here, but the GP completely ignores it.
Re:Misleading title
By AmiMoJo
•
2016-Dec-31 15:01
• Score: 5, Informative
• Thread
The actual complaint to the BBC is quite insightful:
Complaint
A reader complained that the headline of this article was misleading, that the study on which it was based was so flawed as not to merit reporting, and that the terms of the report were not duly impartial in relation to the question of the benefits or otherwise of workforce diversity in particular fields of employment.
Much of it is a standard anti-feminist argument, but the bit about the headline was found to have merit:
Outcome
Whether the study should have been reported was a matter of legitimate editorial discretion and, in the ECUâ(TM)s view, the article did not deal with matters which were controversial in the sense which would require a balance of views. However, there were no grounds for believing that the women among the cohort selected by the study were representative of women in general, and thus no basis for generalising about womenâ(TM)s relative ability. To that extent, the headline was inaccurate.
Partly upheld
Note that they are saying the research itself and the idea that there might be gender bias is not wrong or controversial, just that you can't infer from the study, which only looked at women on Github, that all women experience this bias.
The Slashdot summary is actually worse than the BBC article. It inaccurately summarises both the original article, the correction and the study.
Re:People of all genders should team up ...
By AmiMoJo
•
2016-Dec-31 15:35
• Score: 4, Insightful
• Thread
I'm not a hipster, a millennial or a leftist. But I do see gender issues in tech, for both men and women. It's not about dividing people and games, it's about making things better for everyone.
For example, there was a guy who had his first child at one place I worked. The boss was very upset when he said he wanted to take his full paternity leave allowance, and implied he would never have hired him if he had known. He then spent the next six months berating him for not being a "real man" and not making "his woman" bring up the child.
He ended up quitting before the child was born in the end (long story). If you don't think it's a problem then fine, you are entitled to that, but don't be a dick by moaning about other people trying to address it. It's not a conspiracy against you, unless you think the manager was right.
Careful, your slip is showing
By Solandri
•
2016-Dec-31 15:38
• Score: 5, Insightful
• Thread
Anyone else notice the glaring sexism in the media coverage of this story about purported sexism in programming culture?
"get pull requests accepted more (except when you know they're women)."
When it seems like men are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as discrimination against women.
"Women write better code, study suggests"
When it seems like women are getting preferential treatment, the story is portrayed as women being superior.
I propose journalists be forced to write these stories without knowing ahead of time which gender came out on top in a study. After the story has been written, the editor can go back and insert the proper gender-specific word or pronoun.