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[–] sakuramboo 1 point 3 points (+4|-1) ago 

Considering that usernames can be anything, photo's are not needed, how are they determining who are male and female?

Are they just basing it off what people put for their accounts? How are they validating the authenticity of the sex of the account owner?

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[–] thrus 0 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago 

Are you implying that people on the internet would LIE? say it isn't so fibbing could lead to hurting someone's feelings and no one on GitHub wants that. /s

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[–] ForgotMyName 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago 

It's based on this:

Specifically, we extract users’ email addresses from GHTorrent, look up that email address on the Google+ social network, then, if that user has a profile, extract gender information from these users’ profiles. Out of 4,037,953 GitHub user profiles with email addresses, we were able to identify 1,426,121 (35.3%) of them as men or women through their public Google+ profiles. We are the first to use this technique, to our knowledge.

Though I think it's fair to say that its accuracy is still debatable. They've also now got a strong sample bias toward people that clearly don't care about their anonymity online. Also, even though they determined that the user was female, that provides no proof that users reviewing their PRs have any idea that they're female/male.

I have no idea why you would use your real name/picture/email on GitHub. Use some random screen name and some random avatar (that's what I do). No one on there should care about whether I'm a guy, a girl, or a really smart dog. Code is code. Get good or gtfo, no one cares about your gender.