"Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's. However, when a woman's gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless."
Great demo of a pervasive dynamic, to get through a gate in fields that activate gender biases we require women to be at the highest achievement level to be treated comparably to lower achieving men
Also potentially demos the backlash effect, where socially punishing bias incongruence can be considered more important than getting the value of the work itself. Highly technical women can be hated FOR technical achievement
@grimalkina of course, perhaps men are worse at math due to suppressed empathy and other emotions as part of the pervasive patriarchal norms but we cannot know that (yet).
@matthewskelton men suffer so much in these systems. I talk to my little bros all the time about this. All human innovation work would thrive in an more collaborative and equitable world ❤️
@grimalkina@matthewskelton I was just talking to my therapist about how much men suffer not being able to inhabit their emotional bodies. It’s no wonder we have so much violence and suffering in the toxic masculine culture.
@SRDas@matthewskelton well as with any equity and opportunity gap there are many many things that interact together to manifest it across society. However I agree that these cultures are large contributors, similarly we also find negative impact from "contest cultures" on software teams in our research (although gender stereotypes is one of many pre-existing stereotypes that this type of thing works damage on, + worth noting this negative effect shows up across gender)
@SRDas@matthewskelton but I think the fact that performance and achievement is highly unevenly perceived and the fact that the backlash effect is specifically leveled at certain groups is really key for the disparity being discussed in this particular line of work about open source contributions. Those are quite alarming effects and more specific than just competitiveness.
@grimalkina@SRDas@matthewskelton I’m concerned how those effects compound over time generationally. If long term stress is the one of the biggest killers. What are we doing to our populations and what is the effect over time? Abuse culture with hazing and bullying in general in competitive dynamics?
@matthewskelton@tdpauw That fits with my subjective experience over my career. Women engineers I have worked with, with a few exceptions, have tended to be highly competent and collaborative.
Arguably the exceptions were showing learned toxic behaviours that they developed working in a system where the odds were heavily stacked against them 🤷♂️ (not an excuse, but a possible reason)
@thirstybear@matthewskelton@tdpauw That’s actually a known phenomenon among long-standing and senior women in male-dominated workplaces: I remember seeing it described in a study of women’s survival strategies in academic physics… a conscious, and rather performative rejection/distancing from female-coded behaviours. It’s a lot like the convert’s zeal… or the immigrant-born Home Secretaries who go full Enoch Powell.
I wanted to ask if the author was male because it’s not a surprise to any women I know.
I submitted various pieces of my work for analysis once. They were looking for female and male authored text to analyze to see how they could discern differences.
@Pagan_Animist as @matthewskelton replied to me, probably a big dose of irony behind the writing… I guess you’re probably going to have a bloody good idea of the answer by the time you formalise this stuff into a research question. And it’s an evidence base that will be put to good use in policy-development work.
Ps. I know your pain. My weary, sceptical eyebrow knows it well.
@thirstybear@matthewskelton@tdpauw So, perhaps one explanation for some instances of "women tend
to receive better job performance ratings than men" is a kind of survivor bias ?
Part of me hopes that the doing-less-well men are in that state due to effects of the patriarchy on them. Thus, they would also improve if progress is made.
But, if in the end it turns out to just be true that women (whatever definition is applicable) are better in these roles, then I'm angry that we keep on wasting the potential ! Give me "80% of top rated programmers are women" if that's what gets it all done better!
@matthewskelton I'm not surprised by any of this. PRs are about communication, which includes skills like patience. Of course, the least surprising bit is the discrimination evidence, which is still apalling. Let's not forget about selection bias, though. Those women that knowingly participate, even masquerading under neutral/male names have made a few conscious choices that make it less surprising that their acceptance rates are above average.
@matthewskelton I gotta say, there are days when living your life to the fullest and being taken seriously through it all while being only mediocre at your job is a privilege I'd like to have.
@matthewskelton I’m not sure it’s all that surprising. If we take any traditionally-disadvantaged demographic, in any workplace or discipline, those who persist and reach a given rank are going to have had to work harder/be better to prove themselves than the normative group. It’s the playing-on-easy-mode effect.
@matthewskelton
This should surprise absolutely no one involved in software development, unless they are a Coder Bro, in which case they will be shocked and also deny this!
@matthewskelton It would be interesting to repeat this study today (2024) to see if the situation has improved 8 years after the study was published. Diversity is an important term in the IT industry today, so men should be more aware of the issue of gender bias, which in turn (at least in theory) should lead to less discrimination. At least that's my hope.
@matthewskelton that sentence construction made eyes start twitching!
"Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend to be accepted more often than men's.”
> Why’s this a surprise? Are women, representing about 50% of population, typically cognitively incapable, knuckle draggers (https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/knuckle+draggers)?
@dahukanna@matthewskelton The paper says "We hypothesized that pull requests made by women are less likely to be accepted than those made by men. Prior work on gender bias in hiring [...] suggests that this hypothesis may be true." The way I read it, it sounds like that's why they were surprised: the results came out opposite to their hypothesis. Nothing to do with actual competence.
Plus, even though they didn't say so, I'd guess that bias against women in software engineering is discussed widely enough that the authors would have been aware of it and expecting to find that bias reflected in the rates of PR acceptance. I know not everyone is "tuned in" to the conversation about gender bias (and not everyone believes it 😠), but it seems unlikely that four people with the qualifications to write an academic paper on the topic would be unaware of it or in denial.
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