Gender and Tenure Diversity In GitHub Teams Relate To Higher Productivity 106
New submitter Bogdan Vasilescu writes: Diversity in teams is a double-edged sword. Increased team diversity results in more varied backgrounds and ideas, providing the team with access to broader information, enhanced creativity, adaptability, and problem solving skills. However, due to greater perceived differences in values, norms, and communication styles in more diverse teams, members become more likely to engage in stereotyping, cliquishness, and conflict.
In a recent study, researchers from University of California, Davis and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands have analyzed the effects of gender and tenure diversity on productivity and turnover for more than 23,000 open-source projects on GitHub. Using regression modeling, they showed that after controlling for team size and other confounds (such as a project's age, development model, or amount of social activity), both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a small but significant fraction of the data variability. On an economic and societal scale, these findings suggest that added investments in educational and professional training efforts and outreach for female programmers will likely result in added overall value.
The paper describing the results (preprint PDF here) will be presented at the prestigious ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Seoul, South Korea, in April 2015.
In a recent study, researchers from University of California, Davis and Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands have analyzed the effects of gender and tenure diversity on productivity and turnover for more than 23,000 open-source projects on GitHub. Using regression modeling, they showed that after controlling for team size and other confounds (such as a project's age, development model, or amount of social activity), both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a small but significant fraction of the data variability. On an economic and societal scale, these findings suggest that added investments in educational and professional training efforts and outreach for female programmers will likely result in added overall value.
The paper describing the results (preprint PDF here) will be presented at the prestigious ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Seoul, South Korea, in April 2015.
joint-cause rather than cause/effect? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
I suspect this may be a matter of the disposition of the team causing both diversity and efficiency, rather than diversity directly causing efficiency. Teams that aren't full of a-holes tend to accept more varied members and end up more diverse, and also happen to work well together...
Weeeell... My limited experience is that there is actual benefit to diversity itself. Of course the "disposition" of the team is a necessary prerequisite, but given the same disposition, but lack of diversity because of lack of qualified candidates, and you don't get the same benefits.
I really don't think we should be socially engineering too much to push women into jobs that many do not like. I really don't think 50/50 is necessary. But I definitely see some from 25-30% female (and find it hard to believe
Re: (Score:1)
Exactly (Score:2)
Open-minded people are more accepting of diversity, and will in the aggregate have relatively more diverse teams.
Open-minded people are more accepting of different ideas, and will in the aggregate have relatively more ways of solving a problem.
This does not mean having a diverse team will result in having more ways of solving a problem. Gathering a bunch of like-minded dogmatists from different races/genders is unlikely to result in any benefit.
Re: (Score:2)
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and s
Re: (Score:2)
This, and studies like it, are used to impose diversity on groups that would otherwise not have it, whether by intentional exclusion or by unintentional "doesn't fit the organizational culture." It's not surprising to me that groups which are spontaneously diverse are productive, and I'm perfectly happy to go with the 'open minds accept diverse solutions and diverse people' argument. The question that interests me is whether you can impose social diversity on a group, force them to open their minds, and subsequently become more productive.
I can certainly see where putting a person of color, or a woman, in a group of racist, misogynist bigots would disrupt their happy groupthink and break up their productivity. Regardless of whether that productivity started out a little lower than an equivalent group of non bigots.
The question that interests me is: if you are employing "a group of racist, misogynist bigots"... whatthefuck? Clan members aren't a protected class. Fire their asses.
Re: (Score:1)
But then who would validate the boss's racist, misogynistic world-view?
Re: (Score:1)
It could be a matter of success causing greater diversity, too. If the minority groups (say, women and low-tenure coders) are more inclined to join a successful project, we'd see the same effect.
It's a bit irresponsible to call for educational policy - especially when it's outright discriminatory - on the basis of these results, without even adding this sort of disclaimer.
tl;dr version (Score:5, Insightful)
Quoting from the paper
So, basically if you use a completely BS measure of "productivity" (# of commits) teams that are more diverse and with longer tenure tend to be slightly (1% to 2.5%) more "productive".
Where do I sign up for grant money to produce crap research like this?
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Likely a gender studies department. No one ever audits them and they get to peer review themselves. I believe nearly all of it comes from a circle of about 5 prominent female professors that basically just circle jerk the entire subject.
Re: tl;dr version (Score:1)
Maybe that's where we need more diversity.
Re: (Score:2)
Its the internet and a discussion forum at that... colorful language is a prerequist to being read.
If you're boring, people don't listen and then you might as well not even post... unless it is really short.
And I do love to rant.
Re: (Score:2)
But are we not told that not all women have vaginas and that some women can be women while also having penises?
So... why so bigoted? :-D
I believe a production put on by a feminist organization of the vagina monologues was canceled because it was discriminatory towards women without vaginas. True story.
It is turtles all the way down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Karmashock, you speak as one interested enough to comment, but not interested enough to know jack shit. A delicate balance for you, ja? I like the link you Science and Reason link, so thanks! .... but I'm trans, and although I'm successfully working as a contractor developer, I'm also thinking "maybe this is what people really say behind my back". But then I think ... "the people who matter to me don't think like this, so maybe this guy is full of shit". What do you think? It all sounds like this is a big outrage to you, where the smart people are handling it without a glitch.
I suspect that some of the people who matter to you do think like this.
Try to grasp this; one can be against something but not hate the people who instantiate/exemplify that thing.
I am against smoking, I have many friends who smoke. I am against monotheism, I can still have friends who are muslim. I think transgenderism is just a delusion, does that mean I have to hate you? I don't think so.
You may believe that I'm wrong-headed about your 'condition', or whatever you want to call it, but do you have to beli
Re: (Score:2)
You pull out your trans card like it somehow is a rhetorical auto win.
You believe in our equality yes? Then why are you presuming to cite your persuasion and some how instantly win without actually presenting a reason for it?
You say "maybe people speak about me like you behind my back"... like what? What did I say that was wrong?
Even someone that is trans should get the humor of the trans feminists shutting down the vagina monologues because they don't have vaginas. Come on. That's hilarious.
I'm not afraid
Re:tl;dr version (Score:4, Informative)
They are 6 male authors from the Computer science departmentIt, one female (not a professor). Your stereotyping misled you.
Re: (Score:2)
Fair point. However, a huge amount of the gender studies stuff does go through a uniformly female academic program and nearly all of it is peer reviewed by literally 5 people. So in this case not the case... point to you.
I stand corrected.
Re: (Score:2)
So, basically if you use a completely BS measure of "productivity" (# of commits) teams that are more diverse and with longer tenure tend to be slightly (1% to 2.5%) more "productive".
Where do I sign up for grant money to produce crap research like this?
It's worse than you think - If X and Y are responsible for 2.5% of $FOO, X could be zero while Y could be 2.5%. It's very telling that they cannot give the correlation numbers for either exclusively X or exclusively Y in their paragraph, it has to be given as a sum, because then you can't tell which of them actually has the measured effect.
Poor research (again!) - 2/10 for trying. Good troll though - 10/10 for all the baffling numbers that most people are unable to see through.
Re: (Score:2)
productivity != commit count (Score:1)
They were measuring commit count and calling it "productivity". Commit count could actually mean that there were more bugs, thus more bugfixes commited.
Re:productivity != commit count (Score:5, Insightful)
Doubtless they had some statistics, mostly bad, and went with one that looks better than the others. The advantage is that few people think of commit count as productivity, so they don't game it. I'd like to see the study redone over a longer time, so there could be productivity statistics based on the progress of projects rather than a simple activity measure.
There's also possible biases here. It could be that women are more conservative in what they want to do than men, so the projects that get started and really don't go anywhere (because they're impossible, infeasible, or overly ambitious) tend to be man-heavy. It could be that male chauvinist assholes don't generally work well with anybody, so they first drive women away and then make the project suffer, while men women like to work with tend to do better as a team. Since this is open source development, where everybody works on what they personally decide to do, this will be hard to separate out.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Translation:
Anyone who disagrees with me can be ignored since I am better than them.
Really? (Score:1, Flamebait)
/. are you fucking kidding me? This is every single fucking day now we have another story about gender this-or-that in tech. Give it a fucking rest.
Diversity is fine. Let people do whatever the hell they want to do. But shut the fuck up about it already. Constantly harping on the same shit over and over again. Just like a woman, my god...
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1, Flamebait)
Playing well with others makes this profession sucktastic?
You think a sausage fest of assholes and idiots saying how cool it is there is no girls allowed is a perk? Really?
Funny, my experience is the childish assholes are terrible to work with for a whole slew of reasons -- mostly because they're self entitled spoiled brats who like to throw tantrums.
Re: (Score:2)
No, you're missing the point. I was sent to "diversity training" with coworkers. At my table were immigrants from China, India, Syria, Ireland, South America, and a natural born US Citizen (me). The thing that made it sucktastic, which we all agreed it was, was wasting our time with infantile bullshit about understanding each other, which we already did.
Being preached at about non-problems sucks.
Re: (Score:1)
Conversely, I've encountered a few teams mostly made up of guys who'd known each other for years, went to school together, and had their own little clique.
They were sexist, bigoted douchebags who really were both impossible to work with, and felt they shouldn't be the ones to change. They were offensive to be around, and seem to feel entitled to be.
It got to the point that even other white guys were saying to HR "enough is enough, I can't deal with these clowns any more".
Hell, I once heard someone say to a
Re: (Score:2)
All it takes is a few bad apples to mess it up for everybody.
Your company was covering their ass so that if someone does that in the future they can point to the training and say "you were warned".
Agreed on both counts. The thing that confuses the heck out of me is why anybody would think an hour long session like that is going to change anybody who's really got problems with different people. It seems a totally pointless waste of time and effort instead of just dealing with assholes directly and effectively. And that's why even though I agree with you, I still see the PC police as making things sucktastic. It's like paying a tax to fund a completely wasteful program.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It could just as easily be argued that it indicates sloppy technique or a battle of egos.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
LOL ... you know, you sound like someone who is sooner or later going to get knocked flat on his ass.
I'm no SJW, but I sure as fuck don't defend childish assholes like you.
You're a big talker on the interwebs, but I bet you're a cowardly little shit in person who needs to act tough when there's nobody around.
Taken out by any means available? And you want to be treated like an adult instead of the whiny little prick that you are?
You're sad, and pathetic.
So go take it up the ass and chew on your pillow ... b
Re: (Score:2)
There's nothing sucktastic about working in a diverse environment. What is sucktastic is the constant barrage of social engineering posts dressed up as "science."
"Oh gosh fellas, if we just had more women on the team our GitHub project would have more commits!"
No, no it fucking wouldn't. Who gives a shit? You want your project to be successful? Get good people working on it, who gives a shit what's between their legs.
And the science is garbage. They measure productivity by number of commits. What does the n
Re: (Score:2)
Adblock + noscript + I'm logged in with high karma and have the "disable advertising" box checked.
Re: (Score:3)
/. are you fucking kidding me? This is every single fucking day now we have another story about gender this-or-that in tech. Give it a fucking rest.
Diversity is fine. Let people do whatever the hell they want to do. But shut the fuck up about it already. Constantly harping on the same shit over and over again. Just like a woman, my god...
Oh, the irony... Oh, the humanity ...
...
The same complaint could be said about linux, systemd, bitcoin, privacy, government snooping, social media
If you;re so upset, you can always wait until Bennett Hazelton writes about it.
We can pretty much all agree that the study's methodology absolutely sucks so it has no value. Perhaps it's good that such studies get some "air time" so they can be debunked rather than being accepted as the new "textus receptus". Maybe then, more reasonable arguments that aren'
Re: (Score:2)
The same complaint could be said about linux, systemd, bitcoin, privacy, government snooping, social media ...
This site is supposed to be about exactly that kind of stuff though. If we wanted the latest social justice warrior missives we'd be on pleb.com.
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you missed the part that I bolded where the parent poster had written "Just like a woman, my god ..." right after he complained too many stories "about gender this-or-that in tech. "
We have many issues in tech - including stagnant or declining wages, lousy working conditions, "up-or-out" mentality, ageism, racism, and yes, sexism.
Pretty much every day there are many comments about H1Bs and the lack of job security and "good lock getting a new job after 40", and quite a few stories are about those
Re: (Score:2)
I guess you missed the part that I bolded where the parent poster had written "Just like a woman, my god ..." right after he complained too many stories "about gender this-or-that in tech. "
Mm. Bottom line is that when a woman cries everyone rushes to help, when a man cries he's treated with disdain. That's both the reality and not neccessarily a bad thing for men, indicative as it is of an expectancy to solve problems and deal with personal responsibility, but the OP's dodgy phrasing merely reflects the general social and personal expectations placed on women these days, which are few and far between.
And feminism is not helping in that regard. What, you want to talk about manspreading and the
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
Diversity is fine. Let people do whatever the hell they want to do. But shut the fuck up about it already. Constantly harping on the same shit over and over again. Just like a woman, my god...
On MacRumors, it was reported that Apple dedicated their homepage to Martin Luther King, Jr. a few days ago. The same kind of outrage as yours was the result.
If you don't want to hear about it, surely the title of this thread was a giveaway that should have stopped you from reading it, if that is what you wanted. But that's not what you want. You want people to "shut the fuck up" about a subject that is interesting and important to many people. You must really feel threatened by the idea that women could be part of a software development project.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not threatened. Half my team is women, my boss is a woman, most of the people I report to are women, and I have a happy, productive and harmonious work environment. I'm just tired of seeing the same story over and over again...
The bit about the "Just like a woman..." was a joke.
Re: (Score:2)
You not only don't mention sex, but opportunities or reasons given.
There are positions where the sex of the person matters. This includes washroom attendants, prostitutes, sex surrogates, models, acting roles, and more. When I was in grad school, we had female-only parking ramp escort openings, for good reason.
The trust about "diversity" (Score:2, Insightful)
I used to work for a company that was huge into making sure we had plenty of "diversity". What that meant, was that they didn't hire the best people for the job, unless that helped them meet their diversity quota. It meant that they promoted people who were more "diverse" instead of promoting the people who actually deserved it. These two categories only overlapped about 50% of the time. If you want more diversity, that's great. Do outreach to groups that aren't in the market sector, but don't crap on
Sounds right ... (Score:2)
Teams in which everyone participates and isn't shoved aside work together, teams which act like high school cliques don't.
You can't force that to happen, but the best teams I've ever been on are more or less ego-less, or at least self correcting for maintaining some mutual respect and listening to one another. You duke it out in front of a whiteboard, and then work together the rest of the time.
Some of the shittiest teams I've been have been populated by people who were stuck in what they 'knew', unwilling
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Well, I've been on a fair few teams.
And, we encourage crap ideas. Identifying the crap ideas is how we move forward and identify the good ideas. When you're in a free scrum, throw out all the terrible ideas you can think of -- that's why we're doing it.
However, the dynamic of how you get there makes all the difference in the world in terms of how the team works.
If you need to act like an aggressive douchebag to make yourself feel good, you probably suck as a teammate.
Maybe instead of saying "it's my right
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
In what way are you disagreeing with GP? gstoddart says he likes ego-less teams, you say that everybody should be free to call an idea crap if they've got reasons. That's one of the fundamental traits of the ego-less team: if somebody has reasons to call your idea crap, you're not emotionally invested in it and you can recognize that.
What gstoddart said is that you don't just say "your idea is crap and you should shut up", not the "your idea is crap and this is why" you suggest.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
If I feel I can only contribute ideas that will be greeted warmly, I'm going to shut up when I might have contributed something. If I feel I'll be told to shut up and told I'm a crappy person if my idea is bad, I'm going to shut up preemptively. If I feel like my idea will be eagerly considered no matter what, I'm going to shut up out of fear that I say something stupid and everybody will suffer. If I can kick out ideas that might be crap, and I can rely on others to help evaluate them and tell me why t
Arbitary diversity is not... (Score:5, Insightful)
... actual diversity.
Having a guy and a girl does not mean you have diversity of thought or ideas or talent or ability. It means you have one person that can pee standing up and another that can gestate babies if you give them 9 months and all the ice cream.
If you have a white girl and a black guy that does not mean you have diversity. You have one person that sits down to pee and one person that has to make sure he wears bright clothing when he walks at night to avoid getting hit by cars.
REAL diversity is diversity of MIND not diversity of sex organ or color. You can have more diversity with 10 black women then some random mix of genders and races because those 10 black women might actually be very different people while your random mix of genders and races might only be different on the surface.
This obessession with statistical diversity figures is tedious, stupid, and increasingly depressing.
I am not my gender.
I am not my skin color.
I am not my nationality.
How many people do you think that share my phenotypes are likely to agree with me or think the same way as I do about everything? I assure you... not a lot of them do. I am an odd duck. I am as likely to find someone with a vagina or a different shade of skin that holds my views or thinks the way I do as one that superficially resembles me.
Diversity is not gender or skin color. Diversity is mind.
And if there is anything ironic about the people crying for diversity it is how intolerant they frequently are of anyone that holds any view that is even a little different from their own.
What ever their intentions, they're not creating diversity. They're bullying everyone around them to fall into exact lockstep according to arbitary statistical data that doesn't actually mean anything.
Imagine if we were a bunch of cats. Does it really f'ing matter how many cats of some random number of spots are doing one thing or another?
This is the 21st century. Get over it. You're fighting last century's civil rights issues instead of opening your eyes to the civil rights issues of the 21st century.
What you should be concerned with are things like privacy, corruption, freedom, economic mobility, free flow of information, etc.
That is something that will actually matter. This gender/race crap is relevant only so far as you're dealing with actual racists etc. And since most of these claims boil down to subconscious bias the reality is that we know we're not dealing with the old bigotry anymore. There are bigger issues out there. Focusing on this if anything simply makes it worse because you're making it harder for people to be gender/race blind.
All this crap boils down to at some point is that people want UNofficial race/gender quotas. I think Channel 4 in the UK recently told their managers they'd only get bonuses if their staffs reflected specific race and gender quotas. That is what this stuff creates.
And assuming you got race and gender quotas ubiquitously imposed everywhere, how would that be good for traditionally discriminated populations? After all, everyone would know that they HAVE to be hired even if they're not competent because there are quotas. Which means everyone will assume right or wrong that they're incompetent because they can be hired without being competent.
Just think it through, kids. You're like that simple kid that shows up to track and just runs through all the hurdles without understanding he was supposed to try to jump over them.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Not necessarily. There are a lot of rich kids that know who all the rappers are and there are some poor kids that learned how to play the violin at 8.
You're trying to simply the world. To break everyone down into simple groups and pretend that we're not all just individuals.
I'm an individual. I am not a group. I am not strictly speaking in a lot of groups but I share things in common with a lot of groups that you wouldn't expect.
I know things you wouldn't expect looking at my background. And I like things t
Re: (Score:1)
I'd be all for a meritocracy, but just because you make laws against discrimination doesn't prevent it. For example I quite recently saw a study where they sent out 500 CVs with the same content, only one "Norwegian" name and one foreign name, there was a significant different in how many got called for an interview. "Freakonomics" showed the same between typical "black" and "white" names in the US. A quick Google search indicates that this year in Australia "Simon" had significantly better chances than "Su
Re:Arbitary diversity is not... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, you have to consider that we've also created a situation where it is expensive for businesses to take risks on employees as well.
Now, right or wrong... would you blame a company for feeling that one name or another was less risky?
Something you could do that would make it cheaper to take risks would be to make it easier to fire people arbitarily shortly after being hired. Additionally, reduce the red tape and legal exposure of hiring and then firing someone.
If I can try someone out, see if they're any good first hand, and then have the option to keep them on or terminate them without being subjected to a bunch of bullshit then I'm going to be more inclined to hire people that might not work out.
The other issue is that all this racial/gender/political correct diversity nonsense just makes everyone feel really tense for no reason. Especially people that are painted as the wicked stepmother in this little fairy tale. It is the 21st century.
Raise your hand if you've ever owned slaves.
Raise your hand if you've ever beaten a women for not knowing her place.
Exactly. Can we get over this shit please? We're all just people. If we're going to work together then this nonsense needs to stop. Because bringing it up endlessly if anything makes people of all arbitrarily relevant phenotypes uncomfortable with anyone that isn't a member of their arbitrarily relevant phenotype.
I can fire or yell at a person that is from my phenotype and not get accused of discrimination or racism or sexism or whatever. But do that to someone of another phenotype? Suddenly I'm a fucking monster. That creates problems.
And here some bright spark is going to say "well just don't yell at people"... only sometimes people need to be yelled at. Its that or you just fire everyone that fucked up the first time and while terrible managers think that is a great idea the turn over and constant retraining required to sustain that folly isn't efficient. It is a lot easier to fix a broken employee then it is to replace them typically. The only thing you cannot abide is a lack of integrity or a lack of respect. Either one of those happens from a subordinate and it has to get corrected fast or they're gone.
Re: (Score:2)
Oh you and your sane, reasonable remarks...
Re: (Score:2)
When I was going to grad school, my son was in the University day care. I met the other parents now and then. All sorts of skin colors, nationalities, and religions, and very little diversity of thought. The other parents were fascinating and rational and easy to discuss things with, and worked on a large array of things, but fundamentally they all thought the same way.
Re: (Score:2)
If the issues were still that serious then black people would be in chains and women would be making sandwiches.
Get this through your head. White people freed black people. The black people did not heroically rebel and overthrow their overlords. The opinions and values of the nation changed and black people were freed as a consequence of that.
Same thing with women. Look at Saudi Arabia. Do you honestly think that the men of the west couldn't keep the women making sandwiches for all time? Think again.
And on
Re: (Score:2)
I think what the "study" is missing is the fact that they're studying OSS on GitHub. The diversity there is implicit in the model. GitHub does not have a downtown office where all the contributors meet daily from 9-5 to work on their respective projects. So the talent pool is not artificially limited or hindered by the location. Anybody, anywhere, at any time, can start, end, join, or leave a project at a whim. Contributors are world-wide.
Amazon's Seattle office (not picking on Amazon, it is just
an embarrasssment for CHI (Score:1)
Correlation between productivity and diversity does not mean that increasing diversity increases productivity; correlation is not causation. In fact, at least as plausible is the explanation that big, active projects attract a more diverse developer population.
A second fundamental flaw with the paper is that it uses an unvalidated measure of "productivity": taking some measurement (commit count here) and calling it "productivity" does't mean it actually measures anything like productivity. "Productivity" un
Less chit-chat? (Score:2)
Perhaps with a diverse team there is less shared extracurricular interest to chat about, so meetings tend to be more focused on the subject at hand.
Just a theory, not even a really good one.
Re: (Score:2)
Anecdotes aren't evidence, but they are data: every team I've been on where there is camaraderie and extracurricular activities and discussions was more productive than those where interaction was strictly business. Any sufficiently large project relies on successful communication to succeed, and having a good social dynamic is the best way to foster a team attitude that enables such communication. Also, teammates are more likely to root for, and push each other to success. A bad or missing social dynamic c
Makes you wonder (Score:1)
How we ever landed a man on the moon when NASA was full of WHITE MEN! Imagine what we could have done with a little diversity!
I expect the Chinese IT industry will collapse any day now, it's nothing but Chinese people!
Re: (Score:2)
These things are to do with fashion. Currently, "diversity" is in fashion in the Wes
To save you the click (Score:1)
By "tenure" they mean experience. They don't say why they didn't call it "experience".
Re: (Score:2)