On Tuesday, 22 March 2016 at 18:06:28 UTC, Chris Wright wrote:
https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/
"Surprisingly, our results show that women's contributions tend
to be accepted more often than men's. However, when a woman's
gender is identifiable, they are rejected more often."
In other words, you can be any gender you want! Just don't let
people in the community know if you're not a guy. Hope that
wasn't an important part of your identity, like if your parents
went as far as dressing you in different clothing because your
gender from the day you were born or something like that.
That study really didn't show what the headlines claimed at all:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/02/12/before-you-get-too-excited-about-that-github-study/
"1. Among insiders, women get more requests accepted than men.
2. Among insiders, people are biased TOWARDS women, that is,
revealing genders gives women an advantage over men above and
beyond the case where genders are hidden.
3. Among outsiders, women still get more requests accepted than
men.
4. Among outsiders, revealing genders appears to show a bias
against women. It’s not clear if this is statistically
significant.
5. When all genders are revealed among outsiders, men appear to
have their requests accepted at a rate of 64%, and women of 63%.
The study does not provide enough information to determine
whether this is statistically significant. Eyeballing it it looks
like it might be, just barely.
6. The study describes its main finding as being that women have
fewer requests approved when their gender is known. It hides on
page 16 that men ALSO have fewer requests approved when their
gender is known. It describes the effect for women as larger, but
does not report the size of the male effects, nor whether the
difference is statistically significant. Eyeballing it, it looks
about 2/3 the size of the female effect, and maybe?"
The significance and cause of these effects was not proven
either; the study had many, many confounding factors - including
the fact that they didn't even have an unbiased way of
determining the gender of their subjects, to begin with.
