In IT development, it’s not unusual to find the women to be of a higher standard of ability. They have to be to survive the filters in their profession. It’s not uncommon to see new graduates in ending up in roles based on gender: men into development, women into help desk, tech writing, testing etc. Why? “Girls are good with people” (help desk), “Girls have more attention to detail” (testing) etc. Then, lacking a development role on their CV, it makes it harder for them to get their next job in a development role. You have to be good to survive that filtering.
So I can easily believe the average women on GitHub is of a higher standard of ability than the average male. I suspect the same holds true about Wikipedians. Does anyone actually have the 2011 editor survey data to compare male vs female on other questions like age, level of education, etc. It would be interesting to know how the male and female Wikipedians of 2011 are statistically different in other ways.
Kerry
From: Wiki-research-l [mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Flöck, Fabian
Sent: Friday, 19 February 2016 9:42 PM
To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Gender bias in GitHub (but not entirely what you expect)
There are several issues with this study, some of which are pointed out here in a useful summary: http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/ . Especially making the gender responsible for the difference in contrast to other attributes of the users that might be just linked to the gender (maybe the women that join GitHub are just the very best/professional women, contribute only to specific types of code, etc., etc.) , apart from some other open questions re:methods, seems questionable for me. And I also share the author’s criticism of “science journalism” and it’s propensity for reporting catchy results.
Fabian