Unconscious bias

The idea of this test is to show you that it can be very difficult, or even impossible, to find out if a piece of code is written by a male or a female programmer. I had been teaching first year students in Novosibirsk (Russia) for a few years, and I have a database containing all their solutions to simple tasks, such as basic algorithms, searching, sorting, and graphs; most of them are written in C, some in C++. That's a big amount of data that can be used for making funny things like this one. Quite often in discussions you can hear or read something about the quality of the code written by male or female developers; I hope this test will show you that no such difference exists. After all, google the title of this page.

Interested? Let's start then.

Here is a link to the original discussion, in Russian; thanks to Alexey Feldgendler for hosting that discussion and inspiring me to make this test.

Rules

You will be given ten code fragments, some of them were written by female students, others by male students. For most of them it was the first year of computer programming and the first year of learning C programming language.

These fragments are picked randomly from a database which has 1129 programs, 871 of them written by male students and 258 by female students, but each of the fragments shown to you can be written by either male or female student with an equal probability.

Try to guess who is the author of each fragment. If you refresh the page new programs will be shown and the test will restart (you will lose your progress).

Note: unfortunately, due to a series of database backup-restore operations, all non-ASCII characters in the code fragments were lost and are shown as question marks. But that's good for our test as it makes the task even harder as sometimes you could guess the author by reading their comments in Russian.


Alexander Fenster, fensterfenstername, https://plus.google.com/+AlexanderFenster.