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| Girl's Don't Get Tech? As If ! |
If there has been an area in society that has remained firmly in the grasp of males it surely must be software development and the resulting ‘tech’ industry that flows from it. Tech company’s are famously top-heavy with males and nerdy male culture.
The question is why and is this just a case of boys being better at this skill than Girls?
There certainly has been lots of bias out there traditionally saying that Girls just aren’t as skilled in math or just aren’t as interested.
As You / you may guess i don’t buy these arguments at all. i’ve personally met and worked with many brilliant Female coders and techie ‘geek’ Girls.
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| This is the age of the SuperGirl after all |
Now we have some new evidence which confirms what i suspected all along;
Women write better code, study suggests - BBC News
"Computer code written by women has a higher approval rating than that written by men - but only if their gender is not identifiable.
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 researchers, from the computer science departments at Caly Poly 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 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.
However the researchers' findings are still encouraging, computer scientist Dr Sue Black OBE told the BBC.
"I think we are going to see a resurgence of interest from women in not only coding but all sorts of tech-related careers over the next few years," she said.
"Knowing that women are great at coding gives strength to the case that it's better for everyone to have more women working in tech.
"It was a woman - Ada Lovelace - who came up with the idea of software in the first place, we owe it to her to make sure that we encourage and support women into the software industry," Dr Black added."
So there. If males have been feeling smug and secure in their high tech enclaves i would suggest they start looking over their shoulders. There may be a coming wave of brainy ‘Geek Girls’ breathing down their necks. As in other areas of society, once the Women get some traction they rapidly leaves the boys chocking on Their dust.
