Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but as far as I can tell, the first author is an undergrad CS student. If I had to pick anyone to do a study like this, it wouldn't be someone who studies CS, it would be a social scientist. That being said, that doesn't preclude this from being good work.
I lost confident that this would be good work after reading the fourth sentence, though:
"Research suggests that, indeed, gender bias pervades open source. The most obvious illustration is the underrepresentation of women in open source; in a 2013 survey of the more than 2000 open source developers who indicated a gender, only 11.2% were women"
This is a textbook non-sequitur. It is trivial to show that a gender imbalance in a group or field, even an extreme one, is not proof of gender bias in that group of field; it's not even good evidence.
To be perfectly honest, after reading more of this "study," it's pathetic that this made it through peer review. Shame on this poor child's advisors.
As I suspected, PeerJ is an open-access, pay-to-play journal. I have to ask what kind of "peer-review" is involved. A science blog should have better standards than this.
If women are better coders than men, then there are differences between the sexes. If men are more interested in coding than women, regardless of their relative skill, then there is no difference between sexes and you should shut up right now or we will fire you.
So when do we get to write articles saying East Asian people are better at science than Australian Aboriginal people? That White people are less impulsively violent than Black people?
4 comments
[ 6.6 ms ] story [ 29.8 ms ] threadI lost confident that this would be good work after reading the fourth sentence, though:
"Research suggests that, indeed, gender bias pervades open source. The most obvious illustration is the underrepresentation of women in open source; in a 2013 survey of the more than 2000 open source developers who indicated a gender, only 11.2% were women"
This is a textbook non-sequitur. It is trivial to show that a gender imbalance in a group or field, even an extreme one, is not proof of gender bias in that group of field; it's not even good evidence.
To be perfectly honest, after reading more of this "study," it's pathetic that this made it through peer review. Shame on this poor child's advisors.
As I suspected, PeerJ is an open-access, pay-to-play journal. I have to ask what kind of "peer-review" is involved. A science blog should have better standards than this.
If women are better coders than men, then there are differences between the sexes. If men are more interested in coding than women, regardless of their relative skill, then there is no difference between sexes and you should shut up right now or we will fire you.
Why is this allowed?