Читать книгу Inclusion, Inc. - Sara Sanford - Страница 35

In its early days, tech was seen as a triumphant return to merit-based competition. Unlike their counterparts on Wall Street or in law firms, tech entrepreneurs didn't have to “know someone” to get ahead. A guy with a garage and enough entrepreneurial spirit and grit could bootstrap his own success. The “wild west” of Silicon Valley was rumored to be a new land of equal opportunity, where a competitive work ethic and superior code would determine who rose to the top.

Today on this supposedly level playing field, women represent only about 11 percent of developers.¹⁸ The computer science departments at California Polytechnic and North Carolina State University wanted to understand why. Do women underperform their male peers that badly? Does the sector need to do a better job of marketing to women? Is it just a pipeline problem?

A deep dive into GitHub revealed some answers.¹⁹ This 12-million-person open-source coding community allows members to make and respond to public requests for code for programming projects. This massive exchange provided the opportunity for researchers to observe how gender played a role in coding interactions. They found that code written by women was approved at a higher rate than code written by men. Women's coding acceptance rates dominated men's in the top ten programming languages.

There was one important catch: This trend only applied if women kept their gender a secret.

When female developers publicly displayed their gender, their code acceptance rate was lower than men's. While women may have been producing more competent code than men, their contributions were less likely to be accepted if their gender was known.

Even when we believe we've created objective digital meritocracies, bias left unchecked sabotages our access to excellence.