Gender Bias In Open Source - Not

It is always a relief when I find I was justified in ignoring some "scientific" article from sociology or psychology "proving" some type of discrimination against some group or another. When I come across such items, I always have a residual concern that this time they might actually have a valid finding. The track record, however, of failed protocols is so extensive that it is hard to resist the heuristic - If Social Justice related finding then save time by not reading as it will be proven unfounded.

I came across an article reviewing a recent research project, Gender Bias In Open Source: Pull Request Acceptance Of Women Vs. Men by Josh Terrell, et al. I have a lot experience in the tech industry. As is the case everywhere there are obnoxious people, there are rude people, and very occasionally there are discriminatory people. However, they tend to be 1) rare, and 2) their primary targets of discrimination tend to be towards unprotected groups such as fools, unintelligent people, unambitious people, non-perfectionists, etc.

The big companies in particular are extraordinarily attuned to avoiding the circumstances where there might be a sex (or any other) discrimination suit.

So I am not disposed to believe that for which there is so little real-world evidence (at least in my experience). Fortunately, in the particular article where I came across the study, in the first paragraph, there was the appropriate disclaimer that the research was not peer-reviewed. I quit reading then. Almost guaranteed to be either wrong, or not right.

Later I saw reference that they had not released the raw data for their conclusions substantially reducing any of the sliver of possible credibility that had remained in my mind.

Scott Alexander, with his usual diligence, does the work to remove any last vestige of doubt that this is cognitive pollution.

So, let’s review. A non-peer-reviewed paper shows that women get more requests accepted than men. In one subgroup, unblinding gender gives women a bigger advantage; in another subgroup, unblinding gender gives men a bigger advantage. When gender is unblinded, both men and women do worse; it’s unclear if there are statistically significant differences in this regard. Only one of the study’s subgroups showed lower acceptance for women than men, and the size of the difference was 63% vs. 64%, which may or may not be statistically significant. This may or may not be related to the fact, demonstrated in the study, that women propose bigger and less-immediately-useful changes on average; no attempt was made to control for this. This tiny amount of discrimination against women seems to be mostly from other women, not from men.

The media uses this to conclude that “a vile male hive mind is running an assault mission against women in tech.”

Every time I say I’m nervous about the institutionalized social justice movement, people tell me that I’m crazy, that I’m just sexist and privileged, and that feminism is merely the belief that women are people so any discomfort with it is totally beyond the pale. I would nevertheless like to re-emphasize my concerns at this point.

Its almost as if the social justice movement was simply a fig leaf for grabbing coercive power over others by whatever means required including ignoring basic science protocols.