Where Are Females in OSS Projects? Socio Technical Interactions

Abstract

Recent researches provide evidence that women are underrepresented in the field of computer science. It has been reported that less than 10% of Open Source Software (OSS) contributors in GitHub are women. Although related qualitative and quantitative studies point out the gender gap, the technical and social interaction of females within OSS still remain unexplored and largely misunderstood. As a first step towards proposing articulated actions towards diversity and inclusion, we need first to explore the gender gap in terms of activities and interactions. Thus, we propose to answer the questions: where are females in OSS projects? How they evolve? and How they contribute to the sustainability of the OSS social capital?. We particularly focus on building sociotechnical networks and analyze them to explain how females contribute and interact in practice. We reflect on interactions' graphs and examine through a preliminary study, using data from six OSS projects, possible links between existing findings and the directions we suggest for more gender diversity. We found that females are extremely underrepresented within OSS communities, but when they participate they are productive just as males, they evolve following relatively the same patterns than males and remain more involved in projects than males.

Modeling Gender Differences in Membership Change in Open Source Software Projects

“…For example, it is possible that there has been a reduction in the gender imbalance observed in GitHub. Recent studies of gender differences and diversity suggest, however, that this is likely not the case (e.g., [1], [5]). We therefore expect the application of our analyses to a more recent data set would likely produce similar findings.…”

“…Research finds that participation among women in open sourc software development is low compared to men [1]. This issue is more complicated than a lack of women who are interested in and skilled enough to participate in open source projects.…”

“…In the context of expertise and turnover in open source projects, the data suggest that this occurs even when they are more competent than their male peers [4], and that women are likely to disengage from open source projects faster than men [5]. Owing to these differences in participation, and because of the more general problem of diversity in STEM fields, group diversity has become an increasingly popular topic of discussion across technology-centered fields and also specifically in human-computer interaction (HCI) research [6] and open source project research [1], [4], [7]- [11]. Germonprez and colleagues suggest open source development is undergoing a transformation that may reflect "an evolution or a coming crisis in how open source projects are able to encourage skillful, diverse, inclusive global work" [12, p. 4].…”

Women's Participation in Open Source Software: A Survey of the Literature

“…and Kerzazi [PS15] (Angular.js, Moby, Rails, Tensorflow, Django, Elasticsearch), women represented at least 4.8% of core developers for the projects based on Python, at least 4.5% for C++, and at least 4.2% for Java. From the 158,464 of pull-requests for which Terrell et al [PS4] could identify gender, women had a greater rate of accepted pull-requests in Ruby, Python, and C++.…”