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.

中文翻译：

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阅读软件工程技术文章时的年龄和性别偏见对照实验


在线平台和社区是现代软件工程的关键部分，但经常受到人类偏见的影响。虽然以前的研究调查了人类偏见及其对在线社区效率和公平性的潜在危害，但他们主要关注开源和问答平台，如GitHub和Stack Overflow，但忽视了以受众为中心的在线平台，用于提供编程和与SE相关的技术文章，数百万软件工程从业者分享这些平台。 寻找高质量的软件工程文章（即 SE 的技术文章）并从中学习。此外，之前的大部分工作都揭示了性别和种族偏见，但我们对年龄对软件工程实践的影响知之甚少。在本文中，我们建议调查作者的人口统计信息（性别和年龄）对软件工程技术文章评价的影响以及参与者之间的潜在行为差异。我们进行了一项基于调查的对照人体研究，并收集了 540 名参与者的回复，以调查开发人员对软件工程技术文章的评价。通过控制 SE 技术文章作者档案的性别和年龄，我们发现与年长的男性作者相比，评分者往往对年轻的男性作者有更积极的内容深度评价，并且男性参与者比女性参与者更快地进行技术文章评价，这与之前的研究结果一致。令人惊讶的是，与其他软件工程评估活动（例如，代码审查、拉取请求等）不同。），我们没有发现作者的性别对 SE 技术文章的评价结果存在显著差异。