Dive Brief:

• Computer scientists found that source code written by women is approved 78.6% of the time on GitHub, a software repository, while code written by men is approved only 74.6% of the time, Quartz reports.
• However, if women specify their gender on their profiles, the acceptance rate of their code falls to 62.5%.
• Of the 12 million users on GitHub, American researchers were able to identify the genders of 1.4 million users for their study. Though GitHub does not request developers include gender information, the researchers identified male or female users by cross-checking their email addresses with their Google+ profiles, according to the BBC.

• Dive Insight:

Companies have continued to struggle with gender diversity in IT, with women comprising just one-third of the work of nine major tech companies, according to Fortune. Though GitHub is an online community and not a formal workplace, gender bias apparently still persists.

According to a recent study by Elephant in the Valley, almost 60% of surveyed women said they did not have the same opportunities as their male counterparts. Acceptance of their technical capabilities could go a long way in improving gender diversity.

The researchers could not find any correlation among the data other than gender. When users who were not well known in the GitHub community made it clear they were women their code had a lower acceptance rate than when their gender was "not obvious," the BBC reported.  

The researchers concluded that though female users on GitHub are potentially "more competent" overall, bias against them persists.