Gender bias acts as big hurdle for female coders in software industry

The researchers also found that when female coders are clearly identified as women, the acceptance rate goes down considerably, allowing men to have a much higher acceptance rate if gender is taken into account.

Ignoring the fact that people might not be honest about their gender on Google+ and that gender itself is more messy than simply male or female, the researchers now had gender identities for 1.4 million GitHub users. They found that pull requests – or suggested code changes – made on the service by women were more likely to be accepted than those by men.

And of 35 percent identified, researchers say about 111,000 are women and about 2.1 million are men; 78.6 percent of pull requests published by women were accepted while 74.6% of such by men.

“Third, to protect the identities of the people described in this study to the extent possible, we do not plan to release our data that links GitHub users to genders”.

A team of six computer science researchers carried out a study to understand the effect of gender on software development. The authors of this latest study were interested in gender bias on GitHub and expected that women might have a harder time getting their contributions accepted. It is quite common that due to prejudices that prevail in our society in terms of gender, often backfires for female coders, who are never looked upon from the point of view of only their work and not gender.

“There’s a strong belief among developers in open source that the process is a pure meritocracy”, said one of the study’s coauthors, Emerson Murphy-Hill, an associate professor at North Carolina State University.

That doubt is important: “So if women aren’t making software, the end software may be somewhat exclusionary”, he added.

The general idea among the society is that Women are not good in coding when compared to other stuffs like management and all. However, no correlations were found. The team concluded: “Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nontheless”.

In spite of the many initiatives started by tech firms, this gender diversity problem is encountered nearly universally. “If we exclude insiders from our analysis, the women’s acceptance rate (64.4%) continues to be significantly higher than men’s (62.7%)”.