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 in:	PeerJ. 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
Language:	English
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
Online Access:	Get full text
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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.
ISSN:	2376-5992 2376-5992
DOI:	10.7717/peerj-cs.111