2020/07/27 by Edna Dias Canedo, Canedo, Edna Dias, Rodrigo Bonifácio +9
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Open Source Software Innovations #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Software Engineering Research #Wikis in Education and Collaboration
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2007.13891
openalex publication_date 2020/07/27 · openalex created_date 2022/07/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
The effect of gender diversity in open source communities has gained\nincreasing attention from practitioners and researchers. For instance,\norganizations such as the Python Software Foundation and the OpenStack\nFoundation started actions to increase gender diversity and promote women to\ntop positions in the communities. Although the general underrepresentation of\nwomen (a.k.a. horizontal segregation) in open source communities has been\nexplored in a number of research studies, little is known about the vertical\nsegregation in open source communities -- which occurs when there are fewer\nwomen in high-level positions. To address this research gap, in this paper we\npresent the results of a mixed-methods study on gender diversity and work\npractices of core developers contributing to open-source communities. In the\nfirst study, we used mining-software repositories procedures to identify the\ncore developers of 711 open source projects, in order to understand how common\nare women core developers in open source communities and characterize their\nwork practices. In the second study, we surveyed the women core developers we\nidentified in the first study to collect their perceptions of gender diversity\nand gender bias they might have observed while contributing to open source\nsystems. Our findings show that open source communities present both horizontal\nand vertical segregation (only 2.3% of the core developers are women).\nNevertheless, differently from previous studies, most of the women core\ndevelopers (65.7%) report never having experienced gender discrimination when\ncontributing to an open source project. Finally, we did not note substantial\ndifferences between the work practices among women and men core developers. We\nreflect on these findings and present some ideas that might increase the\nparticipation of women in open source communities.\n