Biases against women in the workplace have been documented in a variety of studies. This paper presents a large scale study on gender bias, where we compare acceptance rates of contributions from men versus women in an open source software community. Surprisingly, our results show that women’s contributions tend to be accepted more often than men’s. However, for contributors who are outsiders to a project and their gender is identifiable, men’s acceptance rates are higher. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.
more » « less- PAR ID:
- 10025323
- Publisher / Repository:
- PeerJ
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- PeerJ Computer Science
- Volume:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2376-5992
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. e111
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
Global and team science approaches are on the rise, as is attention to the network underpinnings of gender disparities in scientific collaboration. Many network studies of men’s and women’s collaboration rely on bounded case studies of single disciplines and/or single countries and limited measures related to the collaborative process. We deploy network analysis on the scholarly database Scopus to gain insight into gender inequity across regions and subject areas and to better understand contextual underpinnings of stagnancy. Using a dataset of over 1.2 million authors and 144 million collaborative relationships, we capture international and unbounded co-authorship networks that include intra- and inter-disciplinary co-authorship ties across time (2009–2013). We describe how gender informs structural features and status differences in network relationships, focusing on men and women authors in 16 region-subject pairs. We pay particular attention to how connected authors are (first- and second-order degree centrality), attributes of authors’ collaborative relationships (including the “quality” and other characteristics of these ties), tendencies towards gender homophily (proportion of same-gender ties), and the nature of men’s and women’s interdisciplinary and international reach. Men have more advantageous first-order connections, yet second-order collaborative profiles look more similar. Men and women exhibit homophilous attachment to authors of the same gender, consistent over time. There is notable variation in the level of gender disparity within subjects across countries. We discuss this variation in the context of global trends in men’s and women’s scientific participation and cultural- and country-level influences on the organization and production of science.more » « less
-
Millions of people worldwide contribute content to peer production repositories that serve human information needs and provide vital world knowledge to prominent artificial intelligence systems. Yet, extreme gender participation disparities exist in which men significantly outnumber women. A central concern has been that due to self-focus bias, these disparities can lead to corresponding gender content disparities, in which content of interest to men is better represented than content of interest to women. This paper investigates the relationship between participation and content disparities in OpenStreetMap. We replicate findings that women are dramatically under-represented as OSM contributors, and observe that men and women contribute different types of content and do so about different places. However, the character of these differences confound simple narratives about self-focus bias: we find that on a proportional basis, men produced a higher proportion of contributions in feminized spaces compared to women, while women produced a higher proportion of contributions in masculinized spaces compared to men.more » « less
-
Integrating past research on women of color, stigma transfers, and generalized prejudice, the present research examined the extent to which threats and safety cues to one identity dimension (e.g., gender) results in threat or safety to women of color’s other stigmatized identity dimension (e.g., race). Across three experimental studies (Total N = 638), the present research found support for a dual cue hypothesis, such that Black and Latina women anticipated gender bias from a racial identity threat (Studies 1 and 2) and anticipated racial bias from a gender identity threat (Study 2) resulting in greater overall anticipated bias compared to White women (Study 3). Moreover, Black and Latina women anticipated racial identity safety from a gender identity safety cue (Study 3) supporting a dual safety hypothesis. These studies add to work on double jeopardy by extending a dual threat framework to anticipation of discrimination and highlighting the transferability of threat and safety cues for women of color.
-
Unbiased science dissemination has the potential to alleviate some of the known gender disparities in academia by exposing female scholars’ work to other scientists and the public. And yet, we lack comprehensive understanding of the relationship between gender and science dissemination online. Our large-scale analyses, encompassing half a million scholars, revealed that female scholars’ work is mentioned less frequently than male scholars’ work in all research areas. When exploring the characteristics associated with online success, we found that the impact of prior work, social capital, and gendered tie formation in coauthorship networks are linked with online success for men, but not for women—even in the areas with the highest female representation. These results suggest that while men’s scientific impact and collaboration networks are associated with higher visibility online, there are no universally identifiable facets associated with success for women. Our comprehensive empirical evidence indicates that the gender gap in online science dissemination is coupled with a lack of understanding the characteristics that are linked with female scholars’ success, which might hinder efforts to close the gender gap in visibility.more » « less
-
Attributing gender discrimination to implicit bias has become increasingly common. However, research suggests that when discrimination is attributed to implicit rather than explicit bias, the perpetrators are held less accountable and deemed less worthy of punishment. The present work examines (a) whether this effect replicates in the domain of gender discrimination, and (b) whether sharing a group membership with the victim moderates the effect. Four studies revealed that both men and women hold perpetrators of gender discrimination less accountable if their behavior is attributed to implicit rather than explicit bias. Moreover, women held male (Studies 1–3), but not female (Study 4), perpetrators of gender discrimination more accountable than did men. Together, these findings suggest that while shared gender group membership may inform judgments of accountability for gender discrimination, it does not weaken the tendency to hold perpetrators less accountable for discrimination attributed to implicit, compared with explicit, bias.