Gender and Participation in Open Source Software Development

M. Nagappan N. Weeraddana Mahmoud Alfadel + 2 lainnya

1 November 2023

Diversity has been recognized as a high-value team characteristic. Both open-source and proprietary software organizations have been investing heavily in creating more diverse teams. Prior work has raised diversity concerns about open-source communities; however, to the best of our knowledge, it is not yet clear if those diversity concerns permeate across all of the subteams of the project. Studying diversity in subteams would provide more detailed empirical evidence about the role of diversity in software development teams. Therefore, we perform an empirical study on 110,336 developers who contributed to artifacts of 450 large and thriving open-source projects. We opt to study diversity of the DevOps team because it plays a central role in a project. In particular, we analyze the perceptible ethnic and gender diversity among DevOps contributors to open-source, and we ground our analysis in a comparison to non-DevOps contributors. Overall, our results show that, with respect to perceptible ethnic diversity, contributors with perceptibly White names in a project are the majority of DevOps contributors (median = 87.70%) and non-DevOps contributors (median = 85.50%). With respect to gender diversity, contributors who are perceptible as men in a project are the majority of DevOps contributors (median = 93.75%) and non-DevOps contributors (median = 92.82%). We statistically measure the perceptible ethnic and gender diversity of both DevOps and non-DevOps contributors using diversity metrics, and we find that the diversity of DevOps contributors is significantly less than that of non-DevOps contributors. When analyzing the distribution of diversity change as projects evolve, we find that contributors perceptible as non-Whites (such as Hispanic and Black) are greatly underrepresented. Although the percentage of contributors perceptible as White is decreasing over time, the percentage of contributors perceptible as non-White is still low, i.e., it varies between 0%–16.02% for DevOps and 0%–18.77% for non-DevOps. We observe similar results for gender diversity, where contributors perceptible as men dominate over contributors perceptible as women. Our study provides empirical evidence contributing towards a better understanding of diversity aspects from a different perspective (DevOps vs. non-DevOps contributors). Our findings call for higher awareness, not only of the overall diversity but also of the diversity in specific subteams of the project.

R. Prikladnicki Karina Kohl

5 Oktober 2022

There is a known and established gender imbalance in software engineering structures. The discussions about gender diversity in Software Engineering are on the table; however, which are the benefits and the difficulties people in software development teams see in gender diversity? For this work, we conducted a survey to qualitatively understand the perceived benefits and difficulties of gender diversity in software development teams. We found out that gender-diverse workplaces are prone to have better ideas sharing, better decision making, creativity, and innovation. Respondents mentioned that some companies worked to improve the hiring process to be more gender-inclusive. Women’s support and inspiration were shared, and some men reported being touched by the subject and diligently are deconstructing their prejudice and misconceptions about women in technology. There are also difficulties. It is common to see only one woman in teams or just a few. More than that, no other gender than men and women, so the white, cisgender man is the pattern most of the time. The same pattern repeats itself in leadership positions leading to male protectionism and privileges. Additionally, other dimensions of diversity pervaded the answers, like intersectionality, race/ethnicity, ageism, and a less explored point: social vulnerability.

Lucia Happe Barbora Buhnova

1 Juli 2022

We share findings from a study of 139 women, revealing the frustrations they felt along their way to software engineering and pinpointing promising solutions, such as interdisciplinary education, which could be of enormous help to retaining women in computing.

Riya Dutta Emad Shihab D. Costa + 1 lainnya

31 Januari 2023

Diversity and inclusion are necessary prerequisites for shaping technological innovation that benefits society as a whole. A common indicator of diversity consideration is the representation of different social groups among software engineering (SE) researchers, developers, and students. However, this does not necessarily entail that diversity is considered in the SE research itself.In our study, we examine how diversity is embedded in SE research, particularly research that involves participant studies. To this end, we have selected 79 research papers containing 105 participant studies spanning three years of ICSE technical tracks. Using a content analytical approach, we identified how SE researchers report the various diversity categories of their study participants and investigated: 1) the extent to which participants are described, 2) what diversity categories are commonly reported, and 3) the function diversity serves in the SE studies.We identified 12 different diversity categories reported in SE participant studies. Our results demonstrate that even though most SE studies report on the diversity of participants, SE research often emphasizes professional diversity data, such as occupation and work experience, over social diversity data, such as gender or location of the participants. Furthermore, our results show that participant diversity is seldom analyzed or reflected upon when SE researchers discuss their study results, outcome or limitations.To help researchers self-assess their study diversity awareness, we propose a diversity awareness model and guidelines that SE researchers can apply to their research. With this study, we hope to shed light on a new approach to tackling the diversity and inclusion crisis in the SE field.

Christoph Treude Hideaki Hata

17 Maret 2023

Implicit gender bias in software development is a well-documented issue, such as the association of technical roles with men. To address this bias, it is important to understand it in more detail. This study uses data mining techniques to investigate the extent to which 56 tasks related to software development, such as assigning GitHub issues and testing, are affected by implicit gender bias embedded in large language models. We systematically translated each task from English into a genderless language and back, and investigated the pronouns associated with each task. Based on translating each task 100 times in different permutations, we identify a significant disparity in the gendered pronoun associations with different tasks. Specifically, requirements elicitation was associated with the pronoun “he” in only 6% of cases, while testing was associated with “he” in 100% of cases. Additionally, tasks related to helping others had a 91% association with “he” while the same association for tasks related to asking coworkers was only 52%. These findings reveal a clear pattern of gender bias related to software development tasks and have important implications for addressing this issue both in the training of large language models and in broader society.