Paradise unplugged: identifying barriers for female participation on stack overflow

Abstract

It is no secret that females engage less in programming fields than males. However, in online communities, such as Stack Overflow, this gender gap is even more extreme: only 5.8% of contributors are female. In this paper, we use a mixedmethods approach to identify contribution barriers females face in online communities. Through 22 semi-structured interviews with a spectrum of female users ranging from noncontributors to a top 100 ranked user of all time, we identified 14 barriers preventing them from contributing to Stack Overflow. We then conducted a survey with 1470 female and male developers to confirm which barriers are gender related or general problems for everyone. Females ranked five barriers significantly higher than males. A few of these include doubts in the level of expertise needed to contribute, feeling overwhelmed when competing with a large number of users, and limited awareness of site features. Still, there were other barriers that equally impacted all Stack Overflow users or affected particular groups, such as industry programmers. Finally, we describe several implications that may encourage increased participation in the Stack Overflow community across genders and other demographics.

On the Unhappiness of Software Developers

“…Our sample is not evenly balanced in terms of gender, with males being in the vast majority. We believe, however, that our sample is representative to some extent in terms of gender as well, since males are overrepresented in software engineering jobs, likely due to gender bias [23,57,65]. However, our sample may be extreme in this respect; while exact data is difficult to obtain, some nonacademic surveys have shown, e.g., 7.6% 4 , 16% 5 , and 20% 6 females, but the numbers can depend on the definition of developer and the countries or cultures represented in the data.…”

Consequences of Unhappiness while Developing Software

“…One exception is gender: our sample is strongly unbalanced towards males. We believe, alas, that our sample is representative in terms of gender as well, as it is a known problem that software engineering roles are predominantly filled by males [37], [40], [41], although recent research is attempting to tackle the issue.…”

How Remote Work Can Foster a More Inclusive Environment for Transgender Developers

“…• Building Inclusive Socio-technical Communities: Lucero et al argues that social media technologies are a mechanism for LGBTQ people to comfortably explore their own identity [35]. Meanwhile, within the software engineering community, the use of social communication channels to learn and do work is now widespread [36], and this has raised questions about the experiences of women in this new environment (see [37]). With gender identity in mind, can these technologies be made more inclusive?…”