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Women Are Better At Writing Computer Code, Says Study

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Computer code written by women is deemed ‘better’ than that written by men - but only if their gender is hidden, says a new study.

Looking at submissions by more than a million programmers on computer code-sharing site Github, the research found that suggested code changes or ‘pull requests’ made by women were more likely to be accepted than those made by men.

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

Looking at around 4 million users of on one particular day - 1 April 2015 - the researchers were able to identify the gender of 1.4 million users.

Github doesn’t require users to identify their gender, however, among those profile that had stated their gender, women had a much lower acceptance rate for the code they’d written than those where the gender was not obvious.

The paper has yet to be critically appraised by other experts, though it does raise questions about gender bias faced by female computer coders.

However, the positive aspect of the findings can also be considered encouraging for women working in tech.

Famous female tech pioneers include Ada Lovelace, known for inventing the first computer algorithm and Margaret Hamilton whose coding for NASA helped to get the Apollo mission to the moon.

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Margaret Hamilton next to source code for the Apollo mission’s guidance computer

Image credit: WestEnd61/REX Shutterstock

Via: BBC