  Social coding platforms such as GitHub have become defacto environments for
collaborative programming and open source. When these platforms do not support
specific cognitive styles, they create barriers to programming for some
populations. Research shows that the cognitive styles typically favored by
women are often unsupported, creating barriers to entry for woman newcomers. In
this paper, we use the GenderMag method to evaluate GitHub to find cognitive
style-specific inclusivity bugs. We redesigned the "buggy" GitHub features
through a web browser plugin, which we evaluated through a between-subjects
experiment (n=75). Our results indicate that the changes to the interface
improve users' performance and self-efficacy, mainly for individuals with
cognitive styles more common to women. Our results can inspire designers of
social coding platforms and software engineering tools to produce more
inclusive development environments.
