A Controlled Experiment in Age and Gender Bias When Reading Technical Articles in Software Engineering
Online platforms and communities are a critical part of modern software engineering, yet are often affected by human biases. While previous studies investigated human biases and their potential harms against the efficiency and fairness of online communities, they have mainly focused on the open source and Q & A platforms, such as GitHub and Stack Overflow , but overlooked the audience-focused online platforms for delivering programming and SE-related technical articles, where millions of software engineering practitioners share, seek for, and learn from high-quality software engineering articles (i.e., technical articles for SE). Furthermore, most of the previous work has revealed gender and race bias, but we have little knowledge about the effect of age on software engineering practice. In this paper, we propose to investigate the effect of authors’ demographic information (gender and age) on the evaluation of technical articles on software engineering and potential behavioral differences among participants. We conducted a survey-based and controlled human study and collected responses from 540 participants to investigate developers’ evaluation of technical articles for software engineering. By controlling the gender and age of the author profiles of technical articles for SE, we found that raters tend to have more positive content depth evaluations for younger male authors when compared to older male authors and that male participants conduct technical article evaluations faster than female participants, consistent with prior study findings. Surprisingly, different from other software engineering evaluation activities (e.g., code review, pull request, etc.), we did not find a significant difference in the genders of authors on the evaluation outcome of technical articles in SE.
Fri 2 MayDisplayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change
11:00 - 12:30 | Human and Social 3SE In Practice (SEIP) / Journal-first Papers / Research Track / New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) at 206 plus 208 Chair(s): Yuan Tian Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario | ||
11:00 15mTalk | Relationship Status: “It’s complicated” Developer-Security Expert Dynamics in ScrumSecurity Research Track Houda Naji Ruhr University Bochum, Marco Gutfleisch Ruhr University Bochum, Alena Naiakshina Ruhr University Bochum | ||
11:15 15mTalk | Soft Skills in Software Engineering: Insights from the Trenches SE In Practice (SEIP) Sanna Malinen University of Canterbury, Matthias Galster University of Canterbury, Antonija Mitrovic University of Canterbury, New Zealand, Sreedevi Sankara Iyer University of Canterbury, Pasan Peiris University of Canterbury, New Zealand, April Clarke University of Canterbury | ||
11:30 15mTalk | A Unified Browser-Based Consent Management Framework New Ideas and Emerging Results (NIER) Gayatri Priyadarsini Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar, Abhishek Bichhawat Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar | ||
11:45 15mTalk | Predicting Attrition among Software Professionals: Antecedents and Consequences of Burnout and Engagement Journal-first Papers Bianca Trinkenreich Colorado State University, Fabio Marcos De Abreu Santos Colorado State University, USA, Klaas-Jan Stol Lero; University College Cork; SINTEF Digital | ||
12:00 7mTalk | A Controlled Experiment in Age and Gender Bias When Reading Technical Articles in Software Engineering Journal-first Papers Anda Liang Vanderbilt University, Emerson Murphy-Hill Microsoft, Westley Weimer University of Michigan, Yu Huang Vanderbilt University | ||
12:07 7mTalk | Best ends by the best means: ethical concerns in app reviews Journal-first Papers Neelam Tjikhoeri Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Lauren Olson Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Emitzá Guzmán Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | ||
12:14 7mTalk | Shaken, Not Stirred. How Developers Like Their Amplified Tests Journal-first Papers Carolin Brandt TU Delft, Ali Khatami Delft University of Technology, Mairieli Wessel Radboud University, Andy Zaidman TU Delft Pre-print | ||
12:21 7mTalk | Exploring User Privacy Awareness on GitHub: An Empirical Study Journal-first Papers Costanza Alfieri Università degli Studi dell'Aquila, Juri Di Rocco University of L'Aquila, Paola Inverardi Gran Sasso Science Institute, Phuong T. Nguyen University of L’Aquila |