Women tend to produce better computer code than men, but they are penalized if their gender is common knowledge, new research suggests.
Female coders who submitted proposed changes to publicly available and freely modifiable software through a platform called GitHub had their work accepted more often than men did, but that changed if other users knew the person behind the changes was a woman, the new study found.
“Our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, when a woman’s gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often,” the researchers wrote. “Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.”
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