Female coders with profiles that made their gender identifiable had their code rejected more often than male coders. This suggests a bias in that community, BBC reported:

“Women have a higher acceptance rate of pull requests overall, but when they’re outsiders and their gender is identifiable, they have a lower acceptance rate than men.

“Our results suggest that although women on Github may be more competent overall, bias against them exists nonetheless,” the researchers concluded.

Parikh rejected the idea that Facebook should move to a blind code review process, the Guardian reported:

“As engineers, we might be tempted to build tools to deal with bias, but I don’t believe that this bias is easily addressed in mechanical ways,” he wrote. “Hiding the identity of authors or reviewers is counterproductive from an engineering perspective. Instead we should learn to recognize cases where reactions are affected by bias and move to correct them.”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said gender bias was an “issue” when questioned about the findings during a workplace Q&A session last week, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If only male programmers are helping shape the digital fabric of the online world, Facebook runs the risk of excluding viewpoints and considerations important to half the human populace, The Verge reported.