Study raises questions about gender bias in the world of coding

When it comes to writing computer code, women may be more competent than men, suggestsa new study from California Polytechnic Universityand North Carolina State University.

But the same study identified a troubling gender bias among those who write and approve software.CBC Radio technology columnistDan Misenerexplains what the study found.

What exactly did this study find?

It focused specifically on open-source software development,meaning development of software where the source code is publicly available.

The idea in many open-source projects is that software development is and should bea meritocracy.Good ideas are adopted and bad ideas are rejected, regardless of who originated them.

This study found that when womencontribute to open-source software projects, their contributions are more likely to beaccepted than men's but only if their gender isn't obvious.

Disturbingly, the study foundwhen a woman's gender is known becausethey identify as female in their online profiletheir software contributions are rejected more often.

A lot of the coverage around this story suggests we now have evidence that women are better coders than men, and that there is gender bias in open source communities.

While those things may be true, it's a lot more subtle than that. And it should also be noted thatwhile this study is very interesting, it is currently awaitingpeer review so it does need to be considered with that in mind.

How did the researchers measure gender bias?

The researchers looked specifically at a website called GitHub, which is one of the largest collections of software code in the world. It'shome to a large number of open-source software projects, wherein theoryanyone can contribute.Anybody can sign up for an account and propose a change to a piece of software, whether that's fixing a bugor adding a feature.

So the researchers looked at a huge number of these proposed software changes called pull requestson GitHub.They analyzed the contributions from about 1.5 millionGithub users, and looked at whether contributions from women were treated differently than contributions from men.

They expectedto find a bias against women's contributions.But surprisingly, when they dug into the numbers, they found the opposite that, as the study reports,"women tend to have their [contributions] accepted at a higher rate than men."

Do the researchers know why?

They don'tfor certain, but they did evaluate several possible explanations including the idea that a woman's software contributions might be accepted more often because she appears to be a woman.

The researchers looked for this type of gender bias by examiningwomen's GitHub profiles and checking if theirusernames and profile pictures that were identifiably female, versus gender-neutral usernames and profile pictures. Profile pictures can be the user's face, but may also be otherpictures, such asobjects or symbols.

What they found was that women's contributions were accepted more often than men'swhen womenused gender-neutral profile pictures and usernames.

This has led to the theories mentioned in the study thatwomen in open source are, on average, more competent than menand thatdiscrimination against women does exist in open source.

It's also led to headlines like "Women considered better coders but onlyif they hide their gender." And there has been some criticism of the way the study has been reported in the media.

How does this relate to the number of female coders more generally?

It's true that women are under-represented in computer science.According to a 2013 survey, as few as 11 per cent of open-source developers were women.Here in Canada, women in computing are in the minority, both in education and the workforce.

• UNB professor says fewer women enrolling in computer science

The paper suggests that if the theory is trueand women working in open-source software are more competent than menit could be explained by what's called "survivorship bias."

Women switch out of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) education at a higher rate than men,according to a study cited in the new paper, so the women who remain may indeed be more competent, on average. Thatcould explain why their software contributions are accepted at a higher rate.

What's next for this research?

Again, it's important to keep in mind this study is awaiting peerreview, so we're waiting on that. And the study's authors are also calling for more research, saying in their paper, "...it's imperative that we use big data tobetter understand the interaction between genders. While our big data study does not definitelyprove that differences between gendered interactions are caused by bias among individuals, thetrends observed in this paper are troubling."

Setting aside whether women are more capable coders than men, there's been research that suggests diverse teams of people are more productive, and yield better results.

So that would strongly suggest a lack of gender diversity in computer science is a problem, and what may be important about this kindof research is that it gets beyond anecdotes about gender bias, and tries to takea rigorous, data-driven approach.

And as the researchers say, though coding is held up as a meritocracywhere good ideas win and bad ideas die it's worth re-examininghow true that really is.