Women are underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, as a result of which, not only do women lose career and skill development opportunities, but the projects themselves suffer from a lack of diversity of perspectives. Practitioners and researchers need to understand more about the phenomenon; however, studies about women in open source are spread across multiple fields, including information systems, software engineering, and social science. This paper systematically maps, aggregates, and synthesizes the state-of-the-art on women’s participation in OSS. It focuses on women contributors’ representation and demographics, how they contribute, their motivations and challenges, and strategies employed by communities to attract and retain women. We identified 51 articles (published between 2000 and 2021) that investigated women’s participation in OSS. We found evidence in these papers about who are the women who contribute, what motivates them to contribute, what types of contributions they make, challenges they face, and strategies proposed to support their participation. According to these studies, only about 5% of projects were reported to have women as core developers, and women authored less than 5% of pull-requests, but had similar or even higher rates of pull request acceptances than men. Women make both code and non-code contributions and their motivations to contribute include, learning new skills, altruism, reciprocity, and kinship. Challenges that women face in OSS are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture. We found ten strategies reported in the literature, which we mapped to the reported challenges. Based on these results, we provide guidelines for future research and practice.
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Let's talk open-source: an analysis of conference talks and community dynamics
Open-source software has integrated itself into our daily lives, impacting 78% of US companies in 2015 [11]. Past studies of open-source community dynamics have found motivations behind contributions [3, 14, 18, 19] and the significance of community engagement [8, 17], but there are still many aspects not well understood. There's a direct correlation between the success of an open-source project and the social interactions within its community [7, 9, 17]. Most projects depend on a small group. A study by Avelino et al. [4] on the 133 most popular GitHub projects found that 86% will fail if one or two of its core contributors leave. To sustain open-source, we need to better understand how contributors interact, what information is shared, and what concerns practitioners have. We study common topics, how these have changed over time (2011 - 2021), and what social issues have appeared within open-source communities. Our research is guided by the following questions: (1) How is open-source changing/evolving? (2) What changes do practitioners believe are necessary for open-source to be sustainable?
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- Award ID(s):
- 2150217
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10392543
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ICSE '22: Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 44th International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 322 to 324
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3510454.3522683
