Abstract

Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents the largest study to date 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, women's acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.

Details

Title
Gender differences and bias in open source: Pull request acceptance of women versus men
Author
Terrell, Josh; Kofink, Andrew; Middleton, Justin; Rainear, Clarissa; Murphy-Hill, Emerson; Parnin, Chris; Stallings, Jon
Publication year
2016
Publication date
Jul 26, 2016
Publisher
PeerJ, Inc.
e-ISSN
21679843
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1733v2
ProQuest document ID
1953937827
Copyright
© 2016 Terrell et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (the “License”), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.