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

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 contr...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPeerJ. Computer science Vol. 3; p. e111
Main Authors Terrell, Josh, Kofink, Andrew, Middleton, Justin, Rainear, Clarissa, Murphy-Hill, Emerson, Parnin, Chris, Stallings, Jon
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published San Diego PeerJ. Ltd 01.05.2017
PeerJ, Inc
PeerJ Inc
Subjects
Analysis
Bias
Gender
Gender aspects
Gender differences
Human bias
Men
Open source
Open source software
Sex differences (Psychology)
Sex discrimination
Social networks
Software development
Software engineering
Studies
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Summary: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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ISSN:2376-5992
2376-5992
DOI:10.7717/peerj-cs.111