&quot;said that it was impossible to tell whether a pull request was ignored out of bias, or just because a project owner was busy or knew another developer personally.&quot;<p>This is exactly what I&#x27;ve been saying.  Open source projects are very political and studies like this don&#x27;t really show sexism, it shows favoritism.<p>This is what happens when each project is essentially a dictatorship with a small group of leaders that can pick and choose commits.<p>We should be striving for more of a meritocracy, rather than favoring someone because we like them.<p>The same thing happens with political beliefs as well.