If you happen to work in IT or if you happen to be a bit of techno geek you may widely assume that men are better at coding than women, well you are wrong.
According to a new paper published by Cal Poly and North Carolina State University, it’s thought that the ladies trump there male counterparts when it comes to taking names and coding. The latest research monitored the coding abilities of both genders using the online coding software GitHub for just one day. During the process scientists were able to determine the gender of 1.4 millions users and found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted versus the 74.6% accepted by men. The results also showed that the code women contribute to GitHub is more likely to be accepted by their peers.
Researchers now believe the gender superiority comes as: “Women disproportionately make contributions that projects need more urgently.” Although disappointingly those requests, urgent or otherwise, are only accepted when the women didn’t outright display their gender. The research alarmingly found that those women with gender neutral profiles had their work accepted 71.8% of the time, with the number significantly falling to just 62.5% when their gender became readily identifiable.
The soon to be published paper also claims that: “Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.”