It’s official, women are better at coding than men

It has been found that women’s code, as opposed to men’s, is more highly regarded when it remains anonymous.

This has been determined through recent data by the open source software website GitHub – it is an extensive repository of code cultivated by over 12 million users. It was deemed that women’s contribution on the site could perhaps ‘be more competent overall.’

Researchers looked at around three million ‘pull requests’ submitted on GitHub and found that code written by women was approved at a higher rate than mens – 78.6 per cent to 74.6 per cent respectively. However, the higher rating only existed when female coders were rated anonymously, suggesting that bias against female coders and sexism in the software world still exists.

In an interview with Broadly, Lisa French, an engineer and co-founder of Nashville Women Programmers, said the data was unsurprising. She said: “I don’t feel I have much room for error.

“It can be hard to guide women into this field, when you know all the obstacles they will face based solely on their gender.”