The full paper is very much worth reading.

Peter writes:

> One theory may be that outsiders contribute trivial fixes, which are
> virtually assured to have a 100% acceptance rate by communities that
> wish to expand.

Did you read the paper?

"the changes proposed by women typically included more lines of code than men's, so they weren't just submitting smaller contributions either."

On Fri, Feb 19, 2016 at 6:42 AM, Flöck, Fabian <Fabian.Floeck@gesis.org> wrote:

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/ .

Fabian, slatestarcodex is a perennially unreliable source on discussions of gender issues. You cannot take his analysis at face value and have to actually read the paper.

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.)

The authors discuss this at length. The result observed held true across all languages and many types of code. And their conclusions are indeed guesses about what shared attributes might lead to the strong statistical observation.

"Given that there is no "computer science gene" that occurs more often in women than in men, there has to be a social bias at work."