Study: Women code better if they are not known to be women

In 2012, a programmer named Rachel Nabors proposed fixes to some bugs in open-source software published on the collaboration platform GitHub.

Rachel was surprised to find that all of her proposals were rejected by the project coordinator. The rejections were polite and usually justified by style or procedural errors. Intrigued, Rachel published a article on her blog about her problem. Naughty but realistic, one reader commented that maybe the programmer's gender was to blame.

It took a few years and a study conducted by American researchers to confirm, at least theoretically, the idea. It seems that female programmers are even better appreciated than their male colleagues, but for maximum appreciation, it is not necessary to know that they are women...

Before anyone gets angry, let's look at the figures, published by BBC.

GitHub has a community of 12 million programmers, but it doesn't require gender disclosure in user profiles. However, researchers were able to determine the gender of 1.4 million users, or 12% of the total. How did they do it? Either because the gender was obvious from the profile data or because they found the email address in public profiles on social networks.

Armed with this information, the researchers discovered the following:

• out of a sample of nearly 1.4 million users, 71.81% of women's suggestions for program changes were accepted.
• The interesting part: four times as many proposals made by women were accepted as those made by men.
• The even more interesting part: the proportion of acceptances dropped to 62.5% when the user was identifiable as female.

What do we deduce from this? It's better not to deduce anything and try to fix something on March 1st and 8th.