Participation of Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software. What is the current status and how much has changed in the last 10 years?

Participation of Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software. What is the current status and how much has changed in the last 10 years?

by Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Jesús M. González-Barahona and Santiago Dueñas Domı́nguez.
Associate editor: Stefano Zacchiroli (@zacchiro)

It is well known that women are generally underrepresented in the IT sector. However, in FLOSS (free, libre, and open source) projects the number of women reported is even lower (from 2% to 5% according to several surveys, such as FLOSS 2002 [1] or FLOSSPols [2]). The FLOSS community is aware of this situation, and some projects, such as GNOME and Debian, have promoted the attraction of female participants.

As the previous surveys date back from the early 2000s, we designed a new web survey in 2013 which was answered by more than 2,000 FLOSS contributors, of which more than 200 were women. From the analysis of the answers provided by men and women, mainly those ones that are on their involvement with FLOSS, their educational level and background and personal status, we wanted to shed some light on how the status of female participation in FLOSS is. This blog post shows a glimpse of this. The survey responses are publicly available and documented for further analysis by third parties [3].

We have found that women begin to collaborate at a later age than men. Interestingly enough, as can be seen from Figure 1, while both peak at the age of 21, the tail for women is not that abrupt than the one for men. So, women that start in their thirties are 70% of the ones in the 20s, while for men this number decreases to 30%.

Figure 1 - Age of first contribution to FLOSS. Source [4].

Women perform more diverse tasks than men. While the latter are mostly concentrated on coding tasks (only slightly above 20% of men perform other tasks), with almost 45% "other type of contributions" is the main task chosen by women. The percentage of women who mainly code is 31%, as can be seen from Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Type of contributions to FLOSS projects. Source [4]

Figure 3 shows that while a majority of FLOSS participants does not have children, the number of those who have varies largely depending on their gender. So, the number of women with children (19%) is almost half the number of men with children (34%) as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - Answers to the question Do you have children?.

Graphs have different scales. Source [4]

If we have a look at how much time FLOSS contributors devote to FLOSS, we obtain Figure 4. At first sight the distribution might seem very similar, but a closer look shows that the share of men devoting less than 5 hours/week (50%) is lower than for women (54%), as is the the amount of men working 40 or more hours per week (12% for men and 15% for women). So, contributions to FLOSS projects by women are over-represented among the less active and the full-time professional contributors, in the latter case being probably hired by an industrial software company.

Figure 4 - Number of hours per week devoted to contributing to FLOSS projects. 

Graphs have different scales. Source [4]

All in all, our study confirms (and extends) the results from FLOSS [1] and FLOSSPols [2], even if almost 10 years have passed between both. Even if it is possible that the amount of women is now slightly higher, many contextual patterns have remained the same. So, a study of GitHub developers from 2015 found that only around 6% were women [5], but this increase could be due to the major involvement of the software industry in FLOSS. The current situation is far from what ten years ago was set as a goal, so we may speak of a "lost decade" in the inclusion of women in FLOSS.

A pre-print copy of the full paper "Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The situation in the 2010s" [4] can be found at https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/paper-pre.pdf.

References

[1] Rishab A Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, and Gregorio Robles. Free/libre and open source software: Survey and study, 2002.
[2] Dawn Nafus, James Leach, and Bernhard Krieger. Gender: Integrated report of findings. FLOSSPOLS, Deliverable D, 16, 2006.
[3] Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Alexander Serebrenik, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Jesús M González-Barahona. FLOSS 2013: A survey dataset about free software contributors: Challenges for curating, sharing, and combining. In MSR, pages 396-399, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597129
[4] Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Jesús M. González-Barahona, and Santiago Dueñas Domı́nguez. Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The situation in the 2010s. In OSS 2016, IFIP AICT 472, pp. 163–173, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_13
[5] https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-women

Diversity in software teams: buzzword or necessity?

Associate Editor: Bogdan Vasilescu, University of California, Davis. USA (@b_vasilescu) 

"I've had some bad experiences, particularly based on my gender. [...] a lot of time I'll join an online team and sometimes the other team members are very rude. In the past I have used a fake GitHub handle (my normal GitHub handle is my first name, which is a distinctly female name) so that people would assume I was male. I wouldn't lie if asked directly about my gender, but I know a lot of people assume by default others on the internet are male, and so I use a unisex handle [...] so people assume I am male without asking. I'm not happy with this solution, but sometimes I really want to participate [...] and I don't have the energy to defend myself for being female." [open source developer, USA]

This is not a singular occurrence. Despite its core meritocratic values, the open source "hacker" culture is known to be male-dominated and unfriendly to women [1, p.194]. Some authors go as far as to say that sexist behavior in open source is "as constant as it is extreme" [2]. In open source, women represent only around 10% of the all contributors [3], considerably more underrepresented than in the big tech companies; Google, for example, reports 18% women in technical jobs; Microsoft is close, with 16.6%.

Yet, open source software are well recognised for their high quality, and are becoming increasingly popular. According to a recent survey, 78% of companies run their operations on open source software; 66% create software for their customers on top of open source software. Surely, open source software teams know what they’re doing. By staying homogeneous, teams limit their members’ potential differences in values, norms, and communication styles; it also better shields them from stereotyping, cliquishness, and conflict. It becomes much less likely for team members to disagree if they all think (and look) alike, with the majority class being the Western young white male. 

"Clones" by Nick Royer (CC BY-SA)

However, teams who inadvertently act like this may be missing out. Increased team diversity results in more varied backgrounds and ideas, which provide a team with access to broader information and enhanced creativity, adaptability, and problem solving skills. This fact has been documented countless times in "traditional" teams, that interact face-to-face. Does it also hold online, in the meritocratic open source, where "code sees no color or gender" [4]? After all, on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog.

We set out to investigate how diversity affects team performance on GitHub, the nexus of open source development, using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research methods. First, through a survey with more than 800 respondents [4], we found that individual demographic attributes are surprisingly salient: while developers are, above all, aware of one another’s programming skills, they are also well aware of each other’s gender, real name, and country of residence. Their opinions on diversity are, however, split. Most respondents (62.5%) seem to view diversity as always positive. They acknowledge that diversity in terms of demographics and technical background is often associated with new ideas and approaches to solve problems, access to different networks, lively discussions around issues and pull requests, and ultimately better code. Still, some respondents (30%) report on occasional negative effects due to diversity, such as the developer quoted at the beginning of this blog post, referring to a gender-related incident.

Second, we extracted data from a large sample of 23,000 active projects on GitHub, spanning six years of activity and including a multitude of variables. We focused on two facets of diversity: gender (having a more balanced male-female team; we used people’s names to infer their gender) and tenure (having a mixture of seniors and juniors; we estimated a person’s programming experience from across all their GitHub contributions). We then used regression analysis to model effects associated with diversity on the outputs produced by teams per unit time (we counted the number of commits to a project by team members during a quarter), as a measure of the teams' effectiveness [5]. After controling for team size, project age, social activity, and other confounds, our models show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a small but significant fraction of the data variability.

Together, the two analyses paint a complete picture: diversity is more than a buzzword, it’s a necessity! More diverse teams perform better. On a larger, economic and societal scale, these findings also suggest that added investments in educational and professional training efforts and outreach for female programmers will likely result in added overall value.

[1] Turkle, S. The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit. MIT Press, 2005
[2] Nafus, D. ‘Patches don’t have gender’: What is not open in open source software. New Media & Society 14, 4 (2012), 669–683.
[3] FLOSS 2013 survey, http://floss2013.libresoft.es/results.en.html
[4] Vasilescu, B., Filkov, V., and Serebrenik, A. Perceptions of Diversity on GitHub: A User Survey. In 8th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, CHASE, IEEE (2015), 50–56.
[5] Vasilescu, B., Posnett, D., Ray, B., Brand, M.G.J. van den, Serebrenik, A., Devanbu, P., and Filkov, V. Gender and tenure diversity in GitHub teams. In ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI, ACM (2015), 3789–3798.

If you liked this post, you might also enjoy reading:

• Begel, A.; Bosch, J.; Storey, M.-A., "Social Networking Meets Software Development: Perspectives from GitHub, MSDN, Stack Exchange, and TopCoder," in Software, IEEE , vol.30, no.1, pp.52-66, Jan.-Feb. 2013
• Dabbish, L.; Stuart, C.; Tsay, J.; Herbsleb, J., "Leveraging Transparency," in Software, IEEE , vol.30, no.1, pp.37-43, Jan.-Feb. 2013