Insights Into Nonmerged Pull Requests in GitHub: Is There Evidence of Bias Based on Perceptible Race?

Authors: Reza Nadri Gema Rodríguez-Pérez Meiyappan Nagappan

Venue: IEEESW   IEEE Software, Vol. 38, No. 2, pp. 51-57, 2020

Year: 2020

Abstract: A Github Survey Identified that 30% of GitHub developers are aware of the ethnicity of their team members and that 30% of GitHub developers have faced some form of negative experience because of their country of origin, their language, and their ideology. Furthermore, the 2017 GitHub open source survey2 reported that 11% of GitHub’s respondents had witnessed stereotyping and 3% had experienced stereotyping in the open source software (OSS) community.

These findings motivate the need to understand whether there is racial-based bias from GitHub developers when rejecting the pull requests submitted by different racial groups. This understanding will be the first step in helping OSS developers take the necessary steps to foster a healthy OSS community. As we can identify only the perceptible race of developers based on their GitHub usernames, we will refer to the developers’ race in our article as “perceptible race.”

To shed new light on the perceptible race issues that may affect the rejections of pull requests in GitHub, we conducted a qualitative study to reveal whether there is any evidence of bias based on perceptible race in the written comments of nonmerged pull requests in GitHub. Since this is a qualitative analysis with small and focused samples, we sought in-depth reasoning and quality of results rather than the use of any statistical tools in the process.

BibTeX:

@article{rezanadri2020iinprigiteobbopr,
    author = "Reza Nadri and Gema Rodríguez-Pérez and Meiyappan Nagappan",
    title = "Insights Into Nonmerged Pull Requests in GitHub: Is There Evidence of Bias Based on Perceptible Race?
        ",
    year = "2020",
    pages = "51-57",
    journal = "IEEE Software",
    volume = "38",
    number = "2"
}

Plain Text:

Reza Nadri, Gema Rodríguez-Pérez, and Meiyappan Nagappan, "Insights Into Nonmerged Pull Requests in GitHub: Is There Evidence of Bias Based on Perceptible Race?
        ," IEEE Software, pp. 51-57