Female coders are not solely judged from their work because of gender discrimination. They might be doing a great job but due to their gender, their work is considered as less desirable. This was proven by a recent study carried out by a group of students and professors at North Carolina State University.
The study focused on developers whose gender was known. Those coders whose gender was neutral were left out in the study. When the women are stripped of their gender, their codes are accepted at a higher rate than the codes from male. However, if their gender was known, the acceptance of female code was far worse than the acceptance of male codes. They highlighted so clearly that if women are not taking part in the making of the software, then the final software may be exclusionary. The exclusion of women in the software industry deprives the industry opportunities they could have when women are aboard, irrespective of the reason for their exclusion.
Contribution Rates
Women have a very small contribution in software development as compared to their male counterparts. This is despite the fact that women have proved to be more competent than men in coding. A group of computer science students carried out a research on the reasons why female codes are accepted more than male codes. They considered certain factors that could be making female codes to be acceptable. The factors included whether ladies were making minor changes to the codes and whether the women were better than male in certain kinds of codes. These two factors were not the reasons why female are better coders. The students found out that female acceptance rate dominate over men’s across the top ten programing languages.
Women’s code acceptance is 78.6% compared to men at 74.6%
Most of the studies done are based on popular open-source software known as GitHub. It has over 12 million developers who collaborate, ask questions and also critique about the coding projects. The suggested code contributions at GitHub are known as “pull requests”. Out of 3 million pull requests, codes from women at GitHub are accepted at the rate of 78.6% and those from men at 74.6%. However, this only applies when the gender is unknown.
Guys may clearly rule out the hidden corners of the internet and be considered as computer nerds but in reality it is the ladies who are at the top and taking accolades when it comes to coding. Women are better coders than men. GitHub disadvantages women as it operates in such a way that allows developers to collaborate with one another’s project and their collaboration is either accepted or rejected by the project creator and if gender is part of the coder profile data, it tends to have a negative effect on women, considering that women’s requests are approved more than male’s as long as their gender is neutral.
Studies show that the lack of women in computer science has a lot to do with perception and not the women. All in all, what we take away from this is that women’s codes are accepted at a higher rate than men’s which rightfully leads to the conclusion that women are better coders than men.
