Originally published in The New Stack Update.
Women are more successful at getting pull requests accepted than men on GitHub. That’s the conclusion reported in an academic paper, Gender Differences and Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women Versus Men. By comparing GitHub email addresses with self-reported gender on Google+, researchers found that GitHub pull requests by women are accepted 80 percent of the time versus 74 percent for men. There is a big caveat with these findings. Many of the most successful contributors hide their gender on their GitHub. Excluding insiders (e.g., project owners), women without a tell-tale username have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men. However, when people can identify their gender, men do better. This finding can be extrapolated to the entire LBGTQ community. We’ll let you draw your own conclusions, but bro-culture and misogyny are likely reasons people are hiding their gender.
