Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men | Zendy

Josh Terrell | Zendy; Andrew Kofink | Zendy; Justin Middleton | Zendy; Clarissa Rainear | Zendy; Emerson Murphy-Hill | Zendy; Chris Parnin | Zendy; Jon Stallings | Zendy

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Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men

Author(s) -

Josh Terrell,

Andrew Kofink,

Justin Middleton,

Clarissa Rainear,

Emerson Murphy-Hill,

Chris Parnin,

Jon Stallings

Publication year - 2017

Publication title -

peerj computer science

Language(s) - English

Resource type - Journals

SCImago Journal Rank - 0.806

H-Index - 24

ISSN - 2376-5992

DOI - 10.7717/peerj-cs.111

Subject(s) - gender bias , variety (cybernetics) , open source software , psychology , open source , social psychology , scale (ratio) , computer science , statistics , software , geography , mathematics , cartography , programming language

Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents a large scale study on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless

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