Gender Bias in Source Code Evaluation

Women represent 16% of the software development workforce in the United States. Simultaneously, organizations are unable to meet the increasing demands of software development and maintenance due to a lack of personnel. Gender bias influences female departure from STEM, but for software engineering the problem is possibly exacerbated by disregarded preferences for programming paradigms which impact self-efficacy. The purpose of this study examining gender bias in STEM was to determine if software source code developed by female and male software engineers is evaluated differently, to determine if code developed under structured and object oriented paradigms is evaluated differently, and to determine if there is an interaction effect between developer gender and programing paradigm.