Anonymous Code Reviews Are Really Important

Anonymous code reviews are really important. There is overwhelming evidence that humans are biased by faces and names (and addresses in a “bad” part of town etc)

Here is a collection of thoughts and resources about this.

• http://unbias.io/ A Chrome extension that removes faces and names from LinkedIn to reduce the effects of unconscious bias.
• https://www.greenhouse.io/ A recruiting system that added the ability to have anonymous candidates (specifically for code review)
• How blind auditions help orchestras to eliminate gender bias
• Blendoor article Merit-based job candidate/company matching, photoless
• Interviewing.io voice modulation in phone interviews Twilio writeup of how they used interviewing.io
• Some articles about racial bias in resume response rates based on “blackness” of names huffington post national bureau of economic research chicago tribune
• Bias in academic (professor) hiring Stanford write-up, Scientific American write-up
• The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study , Scientific paper from PNAS
• The Guardian article - Developer bias exposed by anonymizing pull requests on Github Scientific paper source (There is some controversy about how this particular study has been reported)