Insights into Female Contributions in Open-Source Projects
Arifa Islam Champa, Md. Fazle Rabbi, Minhaz F. Zibran, Md Rakibul Islam
Abstract
This paper presents a large quantitative study of the contributions of females compared to males in open-source projects. Female participation is found substantially low and females are found more engaged in non-coding work compared to men. The findings are statistically significant and are derived from an in-depth analysis of over 10 thousand developers’ contributions to more than 81 million different projects in the World of Code (WoC) infrastructure. The insights from this study are useful in addressing gender disparity in the field.
Topics & Concepts
Open sourceCoding (social sciences)Source codeWork (physics)Data scienceOpen source softwareComputer scienceEngineeringSociologySocial scienceSoftwareOperating systemMechanical engineeringOpen Source Software InnovationsDigital Games and MediaWikis in Education and Collaboration