The funny thing is that in my experience female programmers usually have above average skills. I suspect it’s exactly because of this bias against women in tech. Where an average or below average dude can easily get by, this is much harder for women. As a result this bias acts as a kind of filter which results in female programmers being on average a little better than male programmers because all the average or below average ones get filtered out early.
“This paper presents the largest study to date 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, women’s acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.”
The funny thing is that in my experience female programmers usually have above average skills. I suspect it’s exactly because of this bias against women in tech. Where an average or below average dude can easily get by, this is much harder for women. As a result this bias acts as a kind of filter which results in female programmers being on average a little better than male programmers because all the average or below average ones get filtered out early.
I might add, in the hostile environment women may feel compelled to try harder at least to make a point. As in, “I’ll show you what I can do”.
Here’s hard data to match your experience:
“This paper presents the largest study to date 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, women’s acceptance rates are higher only when they are not identifiable as women. Our results suggest that although women on GitHub may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless.”
https://peerj.com/preprints/1733/
That’s probably just because women are smarter than men.