There are obvious issues in attempting to identify someone’s gender online
The BBC article specifically states the study only covered those whose gender was apparent from their profile, or who had profiles linked to social media profiles which made their gender obvious.
There are far more male users on GitHub then one could argue that men are in fact far better at coding because far more are actually doing it and many women are missing in action. Perhaps the small number of women who get involved are marginally better on average, but they would still be vastly outnumbered by men who are equally or more capable.
And the whole point of the article was the quality of the code, not it's quantity.
The media have cherry-picked data from the study which also showed clear bias towards those openly identifying themselves as female in many areas.
Where is the proofs?
Seriously though, the biggest flaw of this study is that it only covers those users whose gender can be determined (kind of the same problem with polls/surveys done over the phone in the 1930s, when certain demographics were more likely than others to have phones in the first place)
Also this image:
https://hequal.files.wordpress.com/2016/12/bbc-search-github-coding.jpgThat's only because the BBC search engine is utterly, ridiculously, horrendously, hilariously, unimaginably, horrifically, inconceivably retarded. It returns no results for the phrase "Github coding study", either with or without double quotes, however an article with a headline containing that phrase is still up on the main bbc site:
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35559439And if you do a Google search on the bbc.com domain with that phrase, that article is the first result.
Also nowhere in the article does BBC "admit" their story was fake news. The real fake news is some nobody blogger sperging out because of a minor amendment to a title on a news site.
