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by legostormtroopr 2982 days ago
This doesn't necessarily imply causation - that being a woman causes people to accept your pull requests.

Identification online is totally voluntary, so perhaps there is something about people who feel the need to specify their gender online, when it isn't necessary (such as when coding) that causes their pull requests to be rejected more.
3 comments
blablabla123 2981 days ago
Yeah but I mean it's quite plausible. There aren't many woman in IT, so I guess those who are, try to be especially careful, efficient etc. On the other hand there are these biases...

In fact this matches an observation an acquaintance of mine of is Post doc in the Physics department made. He is giving courses at University for small groups, that go with the lecture course where students get there corrected exercises and present them. So he said that women in those courses are more or less the only ones motivated and actually being interested in the stuff and that the exercises are also better.

I guess this doesn't have much to do with biology and Google Echo chambers etc but rather that people are aware of biases and counteract them.

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UncleMeat 2981 days ago
That is possible but without some data, any data, to back that hypothesis up it becomes fairly useless. Science doesn't really work by dismissing papers by throwing out unsupported alternative explanations for data.
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true_religion 2982 days ago
People on GitHub use their photos as their avatars so it's truly trivial to determine gender.
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legostormtroopr 2982 days ago
Some people do use their photos. Many people don’t. It’s not “trivial” to determine anyone’s gender on GitHub.
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true_religion 2982 days ago
I had meant to say "many" people---as in many people in my experience.

To me, it's not very surprising as in many countries your picture is customarily included in your curriculum vitae, and as Github is seen as a professional site akin to LinkedIn, people simply put up their pictures there as well.

This is anecdotal, but it's very rare for me to interact with someone on Github and have no idea as to their real name, gender, and face.

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I'll also add, there does seem to be cultural divide between us---as noted that you believe that people have to "feel a need" to add any information (photo/real name) that would show their gender when it isn't "necessary".

Whereas I feel that "real life" identification is the default, and pseudo-anonymity is a considered choice.

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