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© 2017 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 Computer Science) 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.

Abstract

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.

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
2017
Publication date
May 1, 2017
Publisher
PeerJ, Inc.
e-ISSN
23765992
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
1953239029
Copyright
© 2017 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 Computer Science) 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.