Characterizing Women (Not) Contributing to Open-Source

Abstract

Women are under-represented not only in software development, but even more so in the Open-Source Software (OSS) community. In this study we examine whether there are differences between women in OSS community and outside of it. Identifying these differences may help to attract other women to contribute to OSS. Furthermore, it might uncover potential biases in data about female developers that are gathered through the mining of software repositories research. Using the data from the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018, counting 100,000+ respondents (6.9% female), we compare the characteristics of women who report to contribute to OSS and those who report to not contribute. Surprisingly, we did not found the expected differences to be present, thus suggesting that open-source software data represents well the closed-source population of female developers. However, our results did not identify potential correlates of higher under-representation of women in OSS than in closed-source setting.