In GitHub, an online platform for software development where developers store their open source software projects and work with other developers, the technical quality of a coder’s contributions is unquestionably important. And this collaborative software development community has long viewed itself as a meritocracy, one where quality of code is paramount and decisions to accept or reject contributions are based solely on technical excellence.
“A developer’s contributions to an open source software project are accepted or rejected for a variety of technical reasons, but our analysis of tens of thousands of projects on GitHub shows that contributions can be accepted or rejected because of other factors,” said Professor Nagappan. “We found that one of them is the perceived race and ethnicity of a developer based on the person’s name on the platform.”
Read more on the researcher's findings in the feature article.