ABSTRACT
Background. The effect of gender diversity in open source communities has gained increasing attention from practitioners and researchers. For instance, organizations such as the Python Software Foundation and the OpenStack Foundation started actions to increase gender diversity and promote women to top positions in the communities. Problem. Although the general underrepresentation of women (a.k.a. horizontal segregation) in open source communities has been explored in a number of research studies, little is known about the vertical segregation in open source communities---which occurs when there are fewer women in high level positions. Aims. To address this research gap, in this paper we present the results of a mixed-methods study on gender diversity and work practices of core developers contributing to open-source communities. Method. In the first study, we used mining-software repositories procedures to identify the core developers of 711 open source projects, in order to understand how common are women core developers in open source communities and characterize their work practices. In the second study, we surveyed the women core developers we identified in the first study to collect their perceptions of gender diversity and gender bias they might have observed while contributing to open source systems. Results. Our findings show that open source communities present both horizontal and vertical segregation (only 2.3% of the core developers are women). Nevertheless, differently from previous studies, most of the women core developers (65.7%) report never having experienced gender discrimination when contributing to an open source project. Finally, we did not note substantial differences between the work practices among women and men core developers. Conclusions. We reflect on these findings and present some ideas that might increase the participation of women in open source communities.
- Efthimia Aivaloglou and Felienne Hermans. 2019. How is Programming Taught in Code Clubs? Exploring the Experiences and Gender Perceptions of Code Club Teachers. In Proceedings of the 19th Koli Calling International Conference on Computing Education Research (Koli Calling '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3364510.3364514Google ScholarDigital Library
- Guilherme Avelino, Eleni Constantinou, Marco Tulio Valente, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2019. On the abandonment and survival of open source projects: An empirical investigation. In ESEM. IEEE, 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870181, 1--12.Google Scholar
- Guilherme Avelino, Leonardo Teixeira Passos, André C. Hora, and Marco Tulio Valente. 2016. A novel approach for estimating Truck Factors. In ICPC. IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, 1--10.Google Scholar
- Sogol Balali, Igor Steinmacher, Umayal Annamalai, Anita Sarma, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2018. Newcomers' Barriers ... Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors' and Newcomers' Barriers in OSS Projects. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 27, 3-6 (2018), 679--714.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Sebastian Baltes and Paul Ralph. 2020. Sampling in Software Engineering Research: A Critical Review and Guidelines. arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.07764 1 (2020), 1--21.Google Scholar
- Yvonne Benschop. 2006. Of small steps and the longing for giant leaps. Handbook of workplace diversity 1 (2006), 274--298.Google Scholar
- Shubhasheesh Bhattacharya, Sonali Bhattacharya, and Sweta Mohapatra. 2018. Enablers for Advancement of Women into Leadership Position: A Study Based on IT/ITES Sector in India. IJHCITP 9, 4 (2018), 1--22.Google Scholar
- Hudson Borges, Andre Hora, and Marco Tulio Valente. 2016. Predicting the Popularity of GitHub Repositories. In Proceedings of the The 12th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering (PROMISE 2016). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 9, 10 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/2972958.2972966Google ScholarDigital Library
- Valeria Borsotti. 2018. Barriers to gender diversity in software development education: actionable insights from a danish case study. In ICSE (SEET). ACM, ACM, 146--152.Google Scholar
- Amiangshu Bosu and Kazi Zakia Sultana. 2019. Diversity and Inclusion in Open Source Software (OSS) Projects: Where Do We Stand?. In ESEM. ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), IEEE, 1--11. https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870179Google ScholarCross Ref
- Carmen Botella, Silvia Rueda, Emilia López-Iñesta, and Paula Marzal. 2019. Gender Diversity in STEM Disciplines: A Multiple Factor Problem. Entropy 21, 1 (2019), 30.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luca Botturi, Chiara Bramani, and Sean McCusker. 2012. Boys are like Girls: Insights in the Gender Digital Divide in Higher Education in Switzerland and Europe. J. UCS 18, 3 (2012), 353--376.Google Scholar
- Danielle Brown and Melonie Parker. 2019. Google diversity annual report 2019. https://diversity.google/ (Date last accessed 16-April-2019).Google Scholar
- Barbora Buhnova and Dita Prikrylova. 2019. Women want to learn tech: lessons from the Czechitas education project. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, GE@ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 27, 2019, Ivica Crnkovic, Karina Kohl Silveira, and Sara Sprenkle (Eds.). IEEE / ACM, https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00013, 25--28. https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00013Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juan Antonio Campos-Soria, Andrés Marchante-Mera, and Miguel Angel Ropero-García. 2011. Patterns of occupational segregation by gender in the hospitality industry. International Journal of Hospitality Management 30, 1 (2011), 91--102.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, Damian A. Tamburri, Alexander Serebrenik, and Filomena Ferrucci. 2019. Gender Diversity and Women in Software Teams: How Do They Affect Community Smells?. In ICSE-SEIS. IEEE, 10.1109/ICSE-SEIS.2019.00010, 11--20.Google Scholar
- Gemma Catolino, Fabio Palomba, Damian A. Tamburri, Alexander Serebrenik, and Filomena Ferrucci. 2020. Gender Diversity and Community Smells: Insights From the Trenches. IEEE Software 37, 1 (2020), 10--16. https://doi.org/10.1109/MS.2019.2944594Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Christie, Maureen O'Neill, Kerry Rutter, Graham Young, and Angeline Medland. 2017. Understanding why women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) within higher education: A regional case study. Production 27, SPE (2017), 1--9.Google Scholar
- Valerio Cosentino, Javier Luis Cánovas Izquierdo, and Jordi Cabot. 2015. Assessing the bus factor of Git repositories. In SANER. IEEE Computer Society, 10.1109/SANER.2015.7081864, 499--503.Google Scholar
- Nicole Huesman Daniel Izquierdo and Allison Price. 2017. Gender diversity in the OpenStack community: A new report. https://superuser.openstack.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/OpenStack-Gender-Diversity-Report_Apr2017.pdf (Date last accessed 16-April-2019).Google Scholar
- Hélène de Ribaupierre, Kathryn Jones, Fernando Loizides, and Yulia Cherdantseva. 2018. Towards Gender Equality in Software Engineering: The NSA Approach. In GE@ICSE. ACM, ACM, 10--13.Google Scholar
- Belle Derks, Colette Van Laar, Naomi Ellemers, and Kim de Groot. 2011. Gender-Bias Primes Elicit Queen-Bee Responses Among Senior Policewomen. Psychological Science 22, 10 (2011), 1243--1249. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417258 arXiv:https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611417258 PMID: 21873568.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Charles W Dunnett. 1955. A multiple comparison procedure for comparing several treatments with a control. J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 50, 272 (1955), 1096--1121.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Mívian M. Ferreira, Marco Tulio Valente, and Kecia Aline M. Ferreira. 2017. A comparison of three algorithms for computing truck factors. In ICPC. IEEE Computer Society, IEEE, 207--217.Google Scholar
- Denae Ford, Reed Milewicz, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2019. How remote work can foster a more inclusive environment for transgender developers. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, GE@ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 27, 2019, Ivica Crnkovic, Karina Kohl Silveira, and Sara Sprenkle (Eds.). IEEE / ACM, https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00011, 9--12. https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00011Google ScholarDigital Library
- Judit García-González, Patricia Forcén, and Maria Jimenez-Sanchez. 2019. Men and women differ in their perception of gender bias in research institutions. PLOS ONE 14, 12 (12 2019), 1--21. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0225763Google Scholar
- Abdul Rehman Gila, Jafreezal Jaafa, Mazni Omar, and Muhammad Zahid Tunio. 2014. Impact of personality and gender diversity on software development teams' performance. In 2014 International Conference on Computer, Communications, and Control Technology (I4CT). IEEE, IEEE, 261--265.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Lile Hattori and Michele Lanza. 2008. On the nature of commits. In 23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering - Workshop Proceedings (ASE Workshops 2008), 15-16 September 2008, L'Aquila, Italy. IEEE, dblp computer science bibliography, https://dblp.org, 63--71. https://doi.org/10.1109/ASEW.2008.4686322Google ScholarDigital Library
- Julie S. Hui and Shelly Diane Farnham. 2016. Designing for Inclusion: Supporting Gender Diversity in Independent Innovation Teams. In GROUP. ACM, ACM, 71--85.Google Scholar
- Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi. 2019. The underrepresentation of women in the software industry: thoughts from career-changing women. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, GE@ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 27, 2019, Ivica Crnkovic, Karina Kohl Silveira, and Sara Sprenkle (Eds.). IEEE / ACM, https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00008, 1--4. https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00008Google ScholarDigital Library
- Nasif Imtiaz, Justin Middleton, Joymallya Chakrabortty, Neill Robson, Gina Bai, and Emerson R. Murphy-Hill. 2019. Investigating the effects of gender bias on GitHub. In ICSE. IEEE / ACM, 10.1109/ICSE.2019.00079, 700--711.Google Scholar
- Daniel Izquierdo, Nicole Huesman, Alexander Serebrenik, and Gregorio Robles. 2019. OpenStack Gender Diversity Report. IEEE Software 36, 1 (2019), 28--33.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Antonio M. Lopez Jr., Lisa J. Schulte, and Marguerite S. Giguette. 2005. Climbing onto the shoulders of giants. In SIGCSE. ACM, 10.1145/1047344.1047477, 401--405.Google Scholar
- Barbara A. Kitchenham and Shari Lawrence Pfleeger. 2008. Personal Opinion Surveys. In Guide to Advanced Empirical Software Engineering. Springer, 10.1007/978-1-84800-044-5_3, 63--92.Google Scholar
- Frank Konietschke, Marius Placzek, Frank Schaarschmidt, and Ludwig Hothorn. 2015. nparcomp: An R Software Package for Nonparametric Multiple Comparisons and Simultaneous Confidence Intervals. Journal of Statistical Software, Articles 64, 9 (2015), 1--17. https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v064.i09Google Scholar
- Amanda Lee and Jeffrey C. Carver. 2019. FLOSS participants' perceptions about gender and inclusiveness: a survey. In ICSE. IEEE/ACM, 10.1109/ICSE.2019.00077, 677--687.Google Scholar
- Bin Lin and Alexander Serebrenik. 2016. Recognizing gender of stack overflow users. In MSR. ACM, 0.1145/2901739.2901777, 425--429.Google Scholar
- Cristiano Maciel, Silvia Amélia Bim, and Karen da Silva Figueiredo. 2018. Digital Girls Program - Disseminating Computer Science to Girls in Brazil. In GE@ICSE. ACM, https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8452748, 29--32.Google Scholar
- John Maindonald and W. John Braun. 2010. Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An Example-Based Approach (3rd ed.). Cambridge University Press, USA.Google Scholar
- Dawn Nafus. 2012. 'Patches don't have gender': What is not open in open source software. New Media & Society 14, 4 (2012), 669--683.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Noelia Olmedo-Torre, Fermín Sánchez Carracedo, M. Nuria Salan Ballesteros, David López, Antoni Perez-Poch, and Mireia Lopez-Beltran. 2018. Do Female Motives for Enrolling Vary According to STEM Profile? IEEE Trans. Education 61, 4 (2018), 289--297.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Marco Ortu, Giuseppe Destefanis, Steve Counsell, Stephen Swift, Roberto Tonelli, and Michele Marchesi. 2017. How diverse is your team? Investigating gender and nationality diversity in GitHub teams. J. Software Eng. R&D 5 (2017), 9.Google Scholar
- Stack Overflow. 2019. Developer Survey Results 2019. https://insights.stackoverflow.com/survey/2019 (Date last accessed 18-April-2019).Google Scholar
- Gustavo Pinto, Igor Steinmacher, and Marco Aurélio Gerosa. 2016. More Common Than You Think: An In-depth Study of Casual Contributors. In IEEE 23rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering, SANER 2016, Suita, Osaka, Japan, March 14-18, 2016 - Volume 1. IEEE Computer Society, https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2016.68, 112--123. https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2016.68Google Scholar
- Huilian Sophie Qiu, Alexander Nolte, Anita Brown, Alexander Serebrenik, and Bogdan Vasilescu. 2019. Going farther together: the impact of social capital on sustained participation in open source. In ICSE. IEEE/ACM, 10.1109/ICSE.2019.00078, 688--699.Google Scholar
- Penny Rheingans, Erica D'Eramo, Crystal Diaz-Espinoza, and Danyelle Ireland. 2018. A Model for Increasing Gender Diversity in Technology. In SIGCSE. ACM, 10.1145/3159450.3159533, 459--464.Google Scholar
- Filippo Ricca, Alessandro Marchetto, and Marco Torchiano. 2011. On the Difficulty of Computing the Truck Factor. In PROFES (Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing), Vol. 6759. Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-21843-9_26, 337--351.Google Scholar
- Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Alexander Serebrenik, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Jesús M. González-Barahona. 2014. FLOSS 2013: a survey dataset about free software contributors: challenges for curating, sharing, and combining. In MSR. ACM, 10.1145/2597073.2597129, 396--399.Google Scholar
- Karina Kohl Silveira, Soraia Raupp Musse, Isabel Harb Manssour, Renata Vieira, and Rafael Prikladnicki. 2019. Confidence in programming skills: gender insights from StackOverflow developers survey. In ICSE (Companion Volume). IEEE / ACM, 10.1109/ICSE-Companion.2019.00091, 234--235.Google Scholar
- Vandana Singh. 2019. Women-only spaces of open source. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering, GE@ICSE 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 27, 2019, Ivica Crnkovic, Karina Kohl Silveira, and Sara Sprenkle (Eds.). IEEE / ACM, https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00010, 17--20. https://doi.org/10.1109/GE.2019.00010Google ScholarDigital Library
- Igor Steinmacher, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Tayana Uchôa Conte, and David F. Redmiles. 2019. Overcoming Social Barriers When Contributing to Open Source Software Projects. Computer Supported Cooperative Work 28, 1-2 (2019), 247--290.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Josh Terrell, Andrew Kofink, Justin Middleton, Clarissa Rainear, Emerson R. Murphy-Hill, Chris Parnin, and Jon Stallings. 2017. Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men. PeerJ Computer Science 3 (2017), e111.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Parastou Tourani, Bram Adams, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2017. Code of conduct in open source projects. In IEEE 24th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2017, Klagenfurt, Austria, February 20-24, 2017, Martin Pinzger, Gabriele Bavota, and Andrian Marcus (Eds.). IEEE Computer Society, https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2017.7884606, 24--33. https://doi.org/10.1109/SANER.2017.7884606Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bogdan Vasilescu, Andrea Capiluppi, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2014. Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study. Interacting with Computers 26, 5 (2014), 488--511.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Bogdan Vasilescu, Vladimir Filkov, and Alexander Serebrenik. 2013. Stack-Overflow and GitHub: Associations between Software Development and Crowdsourced Knowledge. In International Conference on Social Computing, SocialCom 2013, SocialCom/PASSAT/BigData/EconCom/BioMedCom 2013, Washington, DC, USA, 8-14 September, 2013. IEEE Computer Society, https://doi.org/10.1109/SocialCom.2013.35, 188--195. https://doi.org/10.1109/SocialCom.2013.35Google ScholarDigital Library
- Bogdan Vasilescu, Daryl Posnett, Baishakhi Ray, Mark G. J. van den Brand, Alexander Serebrenik, Premkumar T. Devanbu, and Vladimir Filkov. 2015. Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. In CHI. ACM, 10.1145/2702123.2702549, 3789--3798.Google Scholar
- Yi Wang and David Redmiles. 2019. Implicit Gender Biases in Professional Software Development: An Empirical Study. In ICSE - Software Engineering in Society. ACM, https://bit.ly/2Hu42MJ, 1--10.Google Scholar
- Zhendong Wang, Yi Wang, and David F. Redmiles. 2018. Competence-confidence gap: a threat to female developers' contribution on github. In Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society, ICSE (SEIS) 2018, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27 - June 03, 2018, Valérie Issarny and Schahram Dustdar (Eds.). ACM, https://doi.org/10.1145/3183428.3183437, 81--90. https://doi.org/10.1145/3183428.3183437Google Scholar
Index Terms
- Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities
Recommendations
Women participation in open source software communities
ECSA '19: Proceedings of the 13th European Conference on Software Architecture - Volume 2Gender diversity in open source is an area of concern due to underrepresentation and unfair treatment of women. This paper presents results from research into the experiences of women who participate in open source software (OSS), their advice to ...
Computers work for women: Gender differences in e-supported divorce mediation
Despite the increasing use of e-mediated services to settle divorce, research on its effectiveness is limited. In this paper, we investigate the effectiveness of an asynchronous e-supported tool to mediate divorces in the Netherlands. In order to do so, ...
Gender Representation Among Contributors to Open-Source Infrastructure: An Analysis of 20 Package Manager Ecosystems
ICSE-SEIS '23: Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in SocietyWhile the severe underrepresentation of women and non-binary people in open source is widely recognized, there is little empirical data on how the situation has changed over time and which subcommunities have been more effectively reducing the gender ...
Comments