Students researching the rather closed world of software development have discovered that code written by women was more likely to be approved by their peers than code written by men.  This would fly in the face of the conventional wisdom of rampant sexism in software development if it weren't for one detail.

Let's face it, the tech world is a total sausage fest.  Sexism is well-documented, and a 2013 survey revealed that only a little more than eleven percent of coders are women.  So, the students decided to study GitHub, a repository of code from twelve million users.  Software developers use GitHub to collaborate, suggest improvements or solutions, and review the work of their peers.  A "pull request" is when one developer writes code for someone else's project.   That person can then decide whether to accept the gift.

Out of three million "pull requests", code written by women was approved at a higher rate than code written by men - 78.6 percent for women, 74.6 percent for the guys.  

"Women's acceptance rates dominate over men's for every programming language in the top ten, to various degrees," according to their report.

And now for that detail, it's where the rampant sexism comes in:  The approval rate for women whose GitHub profiles were gender neutral - it's not clear if the coder is male or female - was much higher.  When the profile was clearly female, the acceptance rate was much lower.  Booooooooo.

Gender bias complaints are nothing new at GitHub, whose co-founder Tom Preston-Werner resigned in 2014 after engineer Julie Ann Horvath made a very public exit claiming the company was a cesspool of sexism and intimidation.  An internal investigation cleared Preston-Werner of illegal conduct, but acknowledged that mistakes were made.