Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities
Edna Dias Canedo, Rodrigo Bonif\'acio, M\'arcio Vin\'icius, Okimoto, Alexander Serebrenik, Gustavo Pinto, Eduardo Monteiro

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…
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