[BBC] Women write better code, study suggests

[Discover]

Women write better code, study suggests

Computer code written by women has a higher approval rating than that written by men - but only if it is not obvious that the coders are female, new research suggests.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-355...hannel=rss&ns_source=PublicRSS20-sa

[Bacon_Puffs]

Of course women are generally considered neater than men, so it makes some sense that their code would be cleaner. There are many more things to consider than this though.

[edcoolio]

This study is so flawed it's painful.

GitHub is, by definition, a "social coding" website. This open portion is the only one being studied. Github has private repositories, but of course, the operative word of private. The public portion is deeply flawed, due to the "social" aspect - the value placed on patches/code is directly related to the person submitting it. A kind of programming popularity contest as opposed to a code accuracy and usefulness contest.

So, essentially, this study is designed to find which gender is better at coding in one very large social, open based programming/repository system.

While it may be true that women are better programmes, it also may be true that men are better programmers (on average). To be more specific, it may be easier for one gender to learn programming than another, which is arguably a more important data point when determining outcomes.

What is most likely the case, all of the social engineering loaded studies aside, is what has been true of all industries for hundreds of years: the bulk of the best employees and producers of their respective craft tend to cluster at the highest paying companies which offer the best worker conditions.

In other words, Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc. for the most part don't give a crap about employee gender. They want (and can afford) the best people available to make then as much money as possible... and in the end that's what it's all about.