The Pushback Effects of Race, Ethnicity, Gender, and Age in Code Review

Tech companies are often criticized for a lack of diversity in their engineering workforce. In recent years, such companies have improved engineering workforce diversity through hiring and retention efforts, according to publicly available diversity reports.a However, we know little about the day-to-day, on-the-job experiences of traditionally underrepresented engineers once they join an organization.b A core activity of software engineers at many companies is code review, where one or more engineers provide feedback on another engineer's code to ensure software quality and spread technical knowledge.1 Beyond software companies, code review has long been practiced in open source software engineering and is emerging as an important practice for scientists.2