Women’s work is more highly valued if you can hide that it was done by women. This is the finding of a recent study of coders, but despite the results, this doesn’t mean women should hide their gender to gain more acceptance. In fact, it means just the opposite.
Github is a repository for programming code, people can log in and request code, or browse anonymously and download code. They can also request fixes for existing code or entirely new code for specific purposes. People supplying the code can present a CV and name, but can choose which gender they assign their profile, or choose to not have a gender assigned at all.
The study, released last week, showed that the majority of contributors to Github are men, but where women do contribute, their work is more likely to be accepted than men’s – as long as their gender is hidden. Where they are readily identifiable as women, their acceptance rate drops significantly.
The authors of the study said:
“Surprisingly, 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.”
So there’s two interesting outcomes. Firstly, women are better at coding than men. Why would that be? According to the study:
“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, so the difference between attrition rates of women and men in college appears small. Another explanation is self-selection bias: the average woman in open source may be better prepared than the average man, which is supported by the finding that women in open source are more likely to hold Master’s and PhD degrees. Yet another explanation is that women are held to higher performance standards than men, an explanation supported by Gorman and Kmec’s analysis of the general workforce.”
This makes sense given that 86% of opensource coders are male.
The second point is that women’s work is devalued when their gender is identifiable.
This is a fairly well proven phenomenon. A famous study in 1997 looked at blind auditions for orchestras, where musicians trying out for a position in an orchestra played behind a screen, so the determination of their skill could not be altered by perception bias dictated by their appearance. It found that the likelihood of success for female applicants increased by 50% in a blind audition. Blind auditions accounted for 30-55% of the increase in the percentage of women in orchestras since 1970.
The Github study shows that this perception bias is still in effect and is having a significant impact on women’s ability to use their skills effectively – no matter how well developed those skills are.
While it is disheartening to find discrimination against women still having such an effect, to my mind it is not reason to lose hope, but rather something that should galvanise women to push harder and further. The more women we have in STEM, and in senior positions everywhere, the more we normalise women’s presence and skills, the less impact their visibility will have on how their skills are perceived.
Additionally, the purpose of these studies is to highlight the perception bias still so thoroughly entrenched in so many people, usually outside their conscious awareness. This effect is so documented that even the UN has addressed it and discussed methods for change.
“At regional and international levels, we need to continue to build norms and standards that chip away gender stereotyped norms, practices and beliefs, and ensure that they are translated at the national level into policies and programmes and their implementation.”
This proves that we need ongoing and concerted efforts by women and men to overcome the perceptions of gender that disadvantage women so much, and, to some degree, men as well.
It also reinforces the need for all the work done by agencies like WGEA, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner and the Diversity Council of Australia, as well as the many small groups and individuals who work so hard to improve gender equity in Australia. These organisations, and all the activists and media outlets that focus on discrimination against women are crucial in the push for change. Because without them to bring these issues into public view, and challenge the assumptions that maintain ongoing discrimination against women, change, already so difficult to achieve, would become impossible.