Gender Diversity in Open Source Projects: A Study of the Relevance of Comments Posted on GitHub's Issues

• Estela Miranda Batista UFV
• Gláucia Braga e Silva UFV
• Thais Regina de Moura Braga Silva UFV

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/wit.2022.222628

Abstract

Studies on gender diversity in software communities show low female representation and, consequently, low female participation, generally measured in terms of the number of code contributions. This work addresses female participation in terms of the relevance of comments posted on GitHub's issue tracking using data from 5 open source communities and 5 communities dedicated to women. The results show that, even with little representation, on average, the relevance of comments made by women is similar to that of men. In dedicated communities beyond representativeness, relevance is greater.

Keywords: Gender on GitHub, Communication in Issue Tracking, Blau's Index

References

Biemann, T. and Kearney, E. (2010). Size does matter: How varying group sizes in a sample affect the most common measures of group diversity. Organizational Research Methods, 13:582–599.

Gousios, G. and Spinellis, D. (2017). Mining software engineering data from github. In 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE-C), pages 501–502.

Izquierdo, D., Huesman, N., Serebrenik, A., and Robles, G. (2019). Openstack gender diversity report. IEEE Software, 36:28–33.

Medeiros, D. C., de Queiroz, J. E. R., and Araújo, J. M. F. R. (2014). Análise de funções de similaridade para verificação do conteúdo de mensagens em fóruns de discussão. In Brazilian Symposium on Computers in Education (Simpósio Brasileiro de Informática na Educação SBIE), volume 25, page 144.

Neto, L., Silva, G., and Comarela, G. (2021). Estimativa do tempo de resolução de issues no github usando atributos textuais e temporais. In Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, page 253–262, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.

Neto, L. E. C. and Silva, G. B. e. (2018). Colminer: A tool to support communications management in an issue tracking environment. In Proceedings of the XIV Brazilian Symposium on Information Systems, SBSI’18, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.

Ortu, M., Hall, T., Marchesi, M., Tonelli, R., Bowes, D., and Destefanis, G. (2018). Mining communication patterns in software development: A github analysis. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Predictive Models and Data Analytics in Software Engineering, PROMISE’18, page 70–79, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.

Saadat, S., Newton, O. B., Sukthankar, G., and Fiore, S. M. (2020). Analyzing the productivity of github teams based on formation phase activity. In 2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), pages 169–176.

Singh, V. (2019). Women-only spaces of open source. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering (GE), pages 17–20.

Vedres, B. and Vasarhelyi, O. (2019). Gendered behavior as a disadvantage in open source software development. EPJ Data Science, 8.

Zacchiroli, S. (2021). Gender differences in public code contributions: A 50-year perspective. IEEE Software, 38(2):45–50.

Zolduoarrati, E. and Licorish, S. A. (2021). On the value of encouraging gender tolerance Information and Software and inclusiveness in software engineering communities. Technology, 139:106667.