> The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men: natural gender differences in technical ability<p>Maybe I'm just of a younger generation, but I've literally never heard this in my life. The assumption among people my age has always been that women just generally aren't interested in software development at the same rate that men are; not that they're naturally worse at it!
> <i>First, I infer the gender of users from their usernames and the information provided on their profiles, labeling users as feminine, masculine, ambiguous, and anonymous.</i><p>This isn't going to give accurate results. It's common for those who are female to conceal this fact, with neutral usernames and profiles, to avoid harassment from predatory males.<p>Similiarly, there are many males who present with a feminine username and profile for various reasons, such as a desire to be female.
From the first line of the abstract: "The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men".<p>Perhaps I am obtuse, but I've been in FOSS for 15+ years and I have never heard this as a common topic. When it is infrequently mentioned, its almost always shouted down quite quickly in the FOSS community as sexist nonsense.
I see two issues with the paper.<p>The first is that the measure of quality doesn't actually capture quality. It's like measuring the quality of a writer by looking at only their grammar and spelling.<p>The second is that it implicitly makes causal claims, but the design makes it impossible to infer any causal relationship between sex and code.<p>Curious what others' take is on just the empirics of the paper itself.
Territoriality in code has been a very male pattern that seems bizarre, given the type of work we do. In purely anecdotal experience: A small team hires its first female developer in a team of several. The senior developer on the team recommends against hiring her, but management prevails. In their separate projects everyone in the team is a top performer - they finish the work for a fraction of the estimated time, the female developer knows the languages they work with so well she can identify bugs and future browser quirks even when reading code on paper. Everyone is detail oriented and keep their code meticulous. The team clocks extra hours regularly without complaint.<p>The senior developer is made manager on the team. He begins to require all javascript code to have C-style curly brackets. (the opening bracket goes below the function declaration, not right next to it). The reason for it: he is the only one on the team with a C background and prefers to read everyone’s code that way. Overnight he goes into all repositories for multiple customer projects that have nothing to do with each other and changes the code to his preference. The next day the individual developers who work on each project, lose hours sifting between meaningful changes and style preferences and adjust their code. The next night he changes everyone’s code again. Control and desire for dominance over the code base when the code is essentially multiple consulting projects for multiple different customers done by multiple developers at the same tech consulting firm. His treatment and outbursts were worst against the female developer. The female developer among others on the team left for more senior roles elsewhere soon after.<p>The female software engineers I have worked with have been diligent and thoughtful and often more skilled than male peers, but the treatment of them has always been different in one way or another. I am not surprised if most hide the fact that they are female in open source code contributions. One of the perks of crafting software is you don’t need permission to make stuff, and you certainly don’t need to tolerate bad behavior distracting from the work. The easiest way for teams to lose female developers is to let an insecure bully chase them out.
I confess I find it surprising that they code differently. That is, my prior would be that there is no real difference based solely on sex. Their may be differences based on education. But why sex?
> The underrepresentation of women in open-source software is frequently attributed to women’s lack of innate aptitude compared to men<p>???<p>Yeah there's still some sexist assholes around like this, but this is hardly a mainstream opinion in most circles imo.<p>I'd say a more common explanation these days is lack of interest, rather than aptitude.
For historical reference:<p>> The first algorithm intended to be executed by a computer was designed by Ada Lovelace who was a pioneer in the field. <i>Grace Hopper was the first person to design a compiler for a programming language.</i> [0] Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, and up to World War II, programming was predominantly done by women; significant examples include the Harvard Computers, codebreaking at Bletchley Park and engineering at NASA. After the 1960s, the computing work that had been dominated by women evolved into modern software, and the importance of women decreased. [1]<p>What a crazy history, and wiki entry. My supposition is that as soon as it started to become even slightly obvious that software was going to eat the world, the dominant social paradigm prevailed.<p>[0] WTF, how is she not way more celebrated? She invented the effing compiler!<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing</a>
In my experience the average female coder is significantly worse than the average male coder, but the ones that are good, are usually very good. It just seems to me that males have a greater inclination towards logically structured thinking.
TL;DR They gendered people based on name stereotypes and ran Pylint against their code.<p>Methodology seems questionable.<p>By their own definitions earlier in the article, it seems like Pylint would provide biased results.
Over the years my coder colleagues have been about 95% male and 5% female. Of them, I rate about 80% of the males as producers of quality code, and about 95% of the females as such. That's just my experience and my subjective scores.