Post: #1

Yes, we are all equal, but women are better.
Even at coding.


A new research made headlines this month:
Its title: Gender Bias in Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance of Women Versus Men

It was on the news - Guardian, TheWeek, and of course feminists outlets like this and this.

Yours truly took it upon himself to actually read the article, which did not go through peer review yet.

Here are my findings:
1. 6 people co-wrote it. have read years ago (but could not find the research paper) that the more people write an academic paper, the less are the odds it will be cited (thus having merit).
6 writers - way too much.

2.

Quote: in a 2013 survey of the more than 2000 open source developers who indicated a gender, only 11.2% were women

We know. Less women in STEM. No news here.

Quote:These studies are especially troubling in light of
recent research which suggests that diverse software development teams are more productive than homogeneous teams

That was one papers and actually submitted to a recent conference. And it was specifically on GitHub. So - you were using a recent data (could not access the article) that showed that:

Quote:we show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a sizable fraction of the data variability

(from the said research in 2015).
One research? that's what it takes?

3. The research took 1.4M GitHub members, looked into their Google+ account to find out whether they were male or female.
That is good data collection. One thing though - why not facebook? chances are more people are there.

4.

Quote: Because we cannot summarize all such studies here, we
instead turn to Davison and Burke’s meta-analysis of 53 papers, each studying between 43 and 523 participants, finding that male and female job applicants generally received lower ratings for opposite-sex-type jobs

So you were so lazy - 6 people could read several articles. So you just read one and though it was good enough?

5.

Quote:Some research has focused on differences in gender contribution in other kinds of virtual collaborative environments, particularly Wikipedia. Antin and colleagues followed the activity of 437 contributors with self-identified genders on Wikipedia and found that, of the most active users, men made more frequent contributions while women made larger contributions

Larger = Blah, Blah, Blah. So women wrote more than men. WOW!

6.

Quote:To answer this question, we approached the problem by examining whether men and women are equally likely to have their pull requests accepted on GitHub, then investigated why differences might exist

No comments here - this is Good Research methodology.

7.

Quote: to protect the identities of the people described in this study
to the extent possible, we do not plan to release our data that links GitHub users to genders

I see. So no one would actually be able to look into your stats.

8. Surprise:

Quote:The hypothesis is not only false, but it is in the opposite direction than expected; women tend to have their pull requests accepted at a higher rate than men

Look into it, it is a 4% difference (statistically significant, though).

9. Let's see how this can be explained.
Option 1 -

Quote:Perhaps only a few highly successful and prolific women, responsible for a substantial part of overall success, are skewing the results. To test this, we calculated the pull request acceptance rate for each woman and man with 5 or more pull requests, then found the average acceptance rate across those two groups. The results are displayed in Figure 2. We notice that women tend to have a bimodal distribution, typically being either very successful (> 90% acceptance rate) or unsuccessful (< 10%).

That's interesting. Either women are very successful (= took less chance) or a complete failure.
The writers dismissed it, but I'll get back to it.

Option 2 -

Quote:One plausible explanation is that women’s first few pull requests get rejected at a disproportionate
rate compared to men’s, so they feel dejected and do not make future pull requests

Quote:The acceptance rate of women tends to fluctuate at the right of the graph, because the acceptance
rate is affected by only a few individuals. For instance, at 128 pull requests, only 103 women are represented. Intuitively, where the shaded region for women includes the corresponding data point for men, the reader can consider the data too sparse to conclude that a substantial difference exists between acceptance rates for women and men. Nonetheless, between 1 and 64 pull requests, women’s higher acceptance rate remains.

So, women have less track record, but are submitting more successful accepted code changes.
Option 2 maybe off the table.

Option 3-

Quote:Another explanation for women’s pull request acceptance rate is that, perhaps, women disproportionately make contributions that projects need more urgently. What makes a contribution “needed” is difficult to assess from a third-party perspective

Men were doing more of that. Option 3 is off the table.

Option 4 -

Quote:Maybe women are disproportionately making small changes that are accepted at a higher rate
because the changes are easier for project owners to evaluate

Women changed more lines than men. To the writers it is a signal of taking more risk.
Well - adding descriptions count as adding lines. The researchers did not check whether the code changed was descriptive.
Option 4 is still valid.

Option 5 -

Quote:One potential explanation for why women get their pull requests accepted more often is that the kinds of changes they make are different. For instance, changes to HTML could be more likely to be accepted than changes to C code, and if women are more likely to change HTML, this may explain our results.

Sounds promising.

Quote:Overall, we observe that women’s acceptance rates dominate over men’s for every programming language in the top ten, to various degrees

Option 5 is off the table.

Next is the conclusion:

Quote:Another theory is that women are taking fewer risks than men. This theory is consistent with Byrnes’ meta-analysis of risk-taking studies, which generally find women are more risk-averse than men (20). However, this theory is not consistent with observation 4, because women tend to change more lines of code, and changing more lines of code correlates with an increased risk of introducing bugs

No. I think that a further analysis is required.

They actually naled it further:

Quote:One explanation is survivorship bias: as women continue their formal and informal education in computer science, the less competent ones may change fields or otherwise drop out. Then, only more competent women remain by the time they begin to contribute to open source. In contrast, less competent men may continue. While women do switch away from
STEM majors at a higher rate than men, they also have a lower drop out rate then men

Yes, you got it. Few women start at STEM, few drop out. You have survivor bias.

And my last remark:
What the hell is going on?
You are computer majors. Why are you doing social study/gender type of research?
Are you that incompetent that you cannot research the field you major in?

Post: #2

They probably meant, "Enter discount codes on shopping websites better"

Post: #3

Bullshit.

I work in scientific research and I tell you one thing:
Ignore all research in the social sciences and (nearly) all research in the life sciences.
It is only there to push an agenda; the experiments are redesigned and the data is "massaged" or downright falsified until the desired outcome is obtained.

How many women work at Renaissance Tech or ID Software? That should tell you something about the superiority of their coding skills.

Post: #4

It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this). Therefor, the ones that actually are may very well have an inclination and talent for it.

I say good for them.

Post: #5

The "study" had so many flaws there's really no point in paying any attention to it.

The only interesting bit I saw (not actually mentioned in the paper) was women tend to accept pull requests from men more often than from women, and men tend to accept pull requests from women more often than men. So, clearly men are not biased against women in that regard.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/bef...hub-study/

^ More on the paper. The comments are interesting, though there is of course a bunch of crap to wade through to find the gems.

Programming as a field is like any other. Plenty of women are good at their jobs, but it's almost universally men who are pushing the envelope and taking risks. Women hate being in charge of things, so most projects are also led by men. Et cetera.

I worked as a scientist for several years before moving on to other things, and I can say with certainty that my field at least was nothing like biased against women. In fact, women were favored and given special treatment, and coddled when they fucked up where men would be fired, and were. I knew five guys who got fired in the three years I worked there, mainly for minor crap. No women were fired, despite plenty of fuckups. Our crew was about 50/50 men/women, sometimes with more women than men. Boss actually told me to my face he would've fired me instantly if I'd made the mistake one of the women made because I could handle it, but he didn't want to hurt her feelings. That was almost 5 years ago. Chick still works there as far as I know, and has since gotten at least one other guy fired for her mistakes.

So, I'm sick of this "tech/STEM is biased against women" bullshit. It's not. If anything, women are getting shoved into tech fields they don't actually want to be in in the name of equality.

Post: #6

The study wasn't peer reviewed and was done by undergrads

Post: #7

I wouldn't doubt for a minute that women are better at nitpicking for bugs. They were used extensively in early astronomy and computer science tasks to comb through reams of data looking for stuff. (This is why when you watch modern progressive "history of science" documentaries like the Family Guy remake of Cosmos starring black physicist who doesn't publish any papers, you'll hear a bunch of claims about how the male scientist didn't figure out shit and it was his secretary that actually did everything, but the male scientists were so evil they took all the credit. At this point I imagine the only reason Alan Turing gets to keep credit for inventing half of computer science is because he was such a great poof that they couldn't find any women working with him to transfer the credit.)

But think about this, women are shit writers for the most part. They write books that only are liked by retards: like Twilight, 50 Shades of Grey, and Harry Potter. But they dominate the editing market. They can't create, but they can proofread. This is also why dudes will get F's in high school english and then go on to be novelists while girls get A's and go on to be english teachers.

Same goes for coding. Men are going to be the ones with the ideas and the ability to make an architecture logically sound. And since they're trying to complete a large thing, they'll tend to blow past the obnoxious things like unit testing or other shit you get out of a "best practices" guidebook. Hence, you get bugs. But what you don't have are endless files of unit tests, fifty staff meetings, ten thousand page documentation manuals that are unreadable, and a need to explain why you can't release this year because your staff spent most of their time updating that documentation.

Go into any office doing programming work, and I guarantee you'll find that the women and effeminate men there will be the ones doing the documentation or QA crap.

Post: #8

(02-21-2016 03:31 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this). Therefor, the ones that actually are may very well have an inclination and talent for it.

I say good for them.

Agreed. I used to know a woman that had a degree in engineering and worked at some manufacturing plant. Excellent at her job, and endowed with excellent genetics (aerospace engineer dad and crazy asian mom), but she was so inclined to mathematics that her femininity really suffered. She had very few female friends, hated other women, didn't know how to play 'girl games' and preferred to work on her car vs. going purse shopping. Her social life really suffered because of her 'man like' brain. Women didn't like her because she didn't know how to be girly and joe six pack didn't like her because she was too smart for them. She eventually became a military groupie and found her stride though.

Post: #9

No let's not analyse that. Anyone who has seen a woman and who has seen coding knows this to be false.

Post: #10

(02-21-2016 03:31 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this). Therefor, the ones that actually are may very well have an inclination and talent for it.

I say good for them.

Have you seen what they usually look like?

Post: #11

(02-22-2016 05:18 AM)marty Wrote:  

(02-21-2016 03:31 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this). Therefor, the ones that actually are may very well have an inclination and talent for it.

I say good for them.

Have you seen what they usually look like?

A previous company I worked for was a tech startup building robots/automation solutions. They hired a lot of young talent and a few of the Software Engineers were attractive females. One of Level II engineers was this 30 year old blonde smoke show. She was a good programmer/debugger - though she was the typical chick when it came to work ethic and would try to miss as much work as possible.

Not all talented STEM girls are 'spergs who shed all their femininity.

With that said, I would say a girl who is heavy in STEM would not be a great partner for me or most men who want to have a family. No one is superman/woman. High strength in one area often relates to weakness in others. A woman who is strong in technology, science, mathmatics, etc. and very career oriented will likely lack in nurturing, domestication, and child rearing.

Regardless, they are serving important roles.

Post: #12

(02-22-2016 11:03 AM)General Stalin Wrote:  

(02-22-2016 05:18 AM)marty Wrote:  

(02-21-2016 03:31 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this). Therefor, the ones that actually are may very well have an inclination and talent for it.

I say good for them.

Have you seen what they usually look like?

A previous company I worked for was a tech startup building robots/automation solutions. They hired a lot of young talent and a few of the Software Engineers were attractive females. One of Level II engineers was this 30 year old blonde smoke show. She was a good programmer/debugger - though she was the typical chick when it came to work ethic and would try to miss as much work as possible.

Not all talented STEM girls are 'spergs who shed all their femininity.

With that said, I would say a girl who is heavy in STEM would not be a great partner for me or most men who want to have a family. No one is superman/woman. High strength in one area often relates to weakness in others. A woman who is strong in technology, science, mathmatics, etc. and very career oriented will likely lack in nurturing, domestication, and child rearing.

Regardless, they are serving important roles.

This only proves my point, the vast majority of them are ugly as hell. Either ugly or fat or both. It's not even surprising, this isn't a natural fit for women.

Post: #13

(02-22-2016 11:03 AM)General Stalin Wrote:  With that said, I would say a girl who is heavy in STEM would not be a great partner for me or most men who want to have a family. No one is superman/woman. High strength in one area often relates to weakness in others. A woman who is strong in technology, science, mathmatics, etc. and very career oriented will likely lack in nurturing, domestication, and child rearing.

One of my current LTRs told me a while back that she dated a doctor, who was married (translation = was cheating on his wife with her). The wife was a programmer at a government institute. She says he thought she was so unfeminine, and she had zero sex drive. That is why he cheated on her.
He chose her because he wanted the children to be highly intelligent.
Told her he should have chosen a more feminine wife, and his life might have been way better.

Post: #14

Men say lots of things to get pussy, we all know that.

To me the skill that makes a difference in coding is the one that enables you to take an idea and bring it to fruition. Who takes the idea and makes a product out it? More men or more women?

Post: #15

(02-21-2016 03:31 PM)General Stalin Wrote:  It is my belief that women generally have a tendency to not be interested in STEM fields (statistics also support this).

(02-21-2016 08:45 PM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  Agreed. I used to know a woman that had a degree in engineering and worked at some manufacturing plant. Excellent at her job, and endowed with excellent genetics (aerospace engineer dad and crazy asian mom), but she was so inclined to mathematics that her femininity really suffered.

(02-22-2016 05:18 AM)marty Wrote:  Have you seen what they usually look like?

(02-22-2016 11:03 AM)General Stalin Wrote:  With that said, I would say a girl who is heavy in STEM would not be a great partner for me or most men who want to have a family. No one is superman/woman. High strength in one area often relates to weakness in others. A woman who is strong in technology, science, mathmatics, etc. and very career oriented will likely lack in nurturing, domestication, and child rearing.

(02-22-2016 11:14 AM)marty Wrote:  This only proves my point, the vast majority of them are ugly as hell. Either ugly or fat or both. It's not even surprising, this isn't a natural fit for women.

(02-22-2016 11:16 AM)TheMaleBrain Wrote:  The wife was a programmer at a government institute. She says he thought she was so unfeminine, and she had zero sex drive. That is why he cheated on her.

Capability at math and logic is developed through brain exposure to testosterone.

Therefore it makes complete sense that most women absolutely suck at math and logic and that the few who don't are unattractive.

Post: #16

There was a guy who recently interviewed at my company.

A co-worker asked me to take a look at the guy and so I did some Google searching.

He had a good education background but then I found out the guy had put out shitty research about some SJW crap very much in the same manner as this one and he also wouldn't release the data.

It eventually became a huge scandal upon further investigation of his work and he had to retrack his paper from a major journal and a lot of news sites had to write corrections after citing his research.

The guy even got kicked out of academia.

Needless to say, the guy didn't get the job (and our staffing vendor got bitched at for not finding that themselves since they get paid a lot of money to be useless)

So this type of bullshit research is much more common place than people realize.