Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities

TL;DR

This study investigates gender diversity among core developers in open source communities, revealing low female representation but limited reported discrimination and similar work practices between genders, offering insights for increasing women's participation.

Contribution

It provides the first mixed-methods analysis of women core developers in open source, highlighting the low presence and perceptions of gender bias, and comparing work practices across genders.

Findings

Women constitute only 2.3% of core developers.

Most women (65.7%) report no gender discrimination.

Work practices are similar between women and men core developers.

Abstract

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. We reflect on these findings and present some ideas that might increase the participation of women in open source communities.