Jun, 2016 : Male Coder vs. Female Coder: Which is Better?

📅 June 2, 2016 - Are you torn between the great debate of which is better: male coders vs. female coders? It may seem strange to consider but it's actually something being asked on the web right now. It turns out that people are leaning towards looking at women as the better coder.

It's actually becoming more common to see that women are rated more highly than men as coders but ironically, people don't want to know that the person is a woman. Are women truly the better coder of men vs. women coders? Take a look at whether women have the natural talent for coding that men can't compete with.

What people are saying about the debate

It turns that big sources like the MIT Technology Review and GitHub are showing female coders are more competent than males. A search result in Google will likely you show you that female coders are rated higher than men except for when people are aware they are women. A study was done showing that almost 80% of the time code is written by females, which is about 4% more often than men writing code.

The odd part about it is that the effect is stronger when the woman's gender was kept secret. When a woman did confirm she was a female coder, the acceptance rate would drop over 15%. This shows that while women are better coders, they are more successful if their gender remains unknown and proves there is a gender bias for women working in the tech industry.

If women are better, why is there a debate?

It turns out that while the study was done by GitHub, it wasn't actually published in a peer-reviewed journal or tested by actual scientists. Those who came up with the results were simply undergrads rather than experts in the field or professors.

The study is getting much attention while lacking any true proof. That didn't stop the tech press from jumping on this data though despite lack of proof that women are better coders than men. What it does do is improves the image of women in tech.

We already knew that women were naturally great at working in an office, planning, and scheduling, but there isn't much to backup how natural women are at working in tech. In fact, computer programming was originally designed with women in mind, seeing that they could naturally excel at the task just like they do at planning a dinner and scheduling when you need it.

Actually the world's first modern computer called ENIAC was full of six female programmers and a female named Grace Murray Hopper invented the COBOL programming language. While it's almost a stereotype that women are best at planning and scheduling a dinner making them better at planning and scheduling in computer programming, it's still shows that coding was actually designed to be a female sport and male coders are newer to the game.

While there isn't much proof that women are the natural coders and better at it than men, it's pretty clear based on its history that it was always favoring women.