Women write better code, study suggests

Computer code written by women has a higher approval rating than that written by men - but only if their gender is not identifiable, new research suggests.

The US researchers analysed nearly 1.4 million users of the open source program-sharing service Github.

They found that pull requests - or suggested code changes - made on the service by women were more likely to be accepted than those by men.

The paper is awaiting peer review. This means the results have yet to be critically appraised by other experts.

The researchers, from the computer science departments at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo, and North Carolina State University, looked at around four million people who logged on to Github on a single day - 1 April 2015.

Github is an enormous developer community which does not request gender information from its 12 million users.

However the team was able to identify whether roughly 1.4m were male or female - either because it was clear from the users` profiles or because their email addresses could be matched with the Google + social network.

The researchers accepted that this was a privacy risk but said they did not intend to publish the raw data.

The team found that 78.6% of pull requests made by women were accepted compared with 74.6% of those by men.

The researchers considered various factors, such as whether women were more likely to be responding to known issues, whether their contributions were shorter in length and so easier to appraise, and which programming language they were using, but they could not find a correlation.

However among users who were not well known within the community, those whose profiles made clear that they were women had a much lower acceptance rate than those whose gender was not obvious.

"For outsiders, we see evidence for gender bias: women`s acceptance rates are 71.8% when they use gender neutral profiles, but drop to 62.5% when their gender is identifiable . There is a similar drop for men, but the effect is not as strong," the paper noted.

"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.

"Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless," the researchers concluded.