The OpenStack Foundation's goal is to "promote the global development, distribution and adoption of open infrastructure." As in many other open source communities, and in the technology industry as a whole, the OpenStack community reflected a lack of representation of females and underrepresented minorities, a fact that should be supported with evidence. Intel and Bitergia have conducted research to assess the current state of gender diversity within the community, examining both code and non-code contributions, including leadership, governance, and event representation, among other elements. In this paper, the authors summarize the results of this research. They discuss the importance of using data to increase awareness of this issue and to guide subsequent actions to improve the diversity and inclusion within the OpenStack community. This is the first comprehensive analysis of gender diversity within the OpenStack community, and has opened the possibility of extending insights from this research to other communities.
Why Gender?Engagement of people of different genders in software engineering is heavily skewed towards men; multiple studies show that the situation in open source is even worse [11,12]. There are several reasons why diversity, in all of its forms, is essential in open source communities, and the larger technology industry. Indeed, in addition to the ethical arguments favoring diversity, recent studies show that gender diversity leads to better balance between the traits of feminine and masculine roles [2], makes teams more productive [12] and benefits both industrial and academic teams [5]. Moreover, a more diverse development team comes closer to the inherently diverse population of the software users. Therefore, a more diverse development team is more likely to understand and represent the users' needs, contributing to the better alignment between software and its intended customers [9].Not surprisingly, multiple open source projects have tried to increase the diversity of their communities, specifically gender diversity, as evident in the formation of many "Women in" groups established in Linux, GNOME, Ubuntu or Debian. Despite these efforts, the situation has not changed much in the last 15 years, resulting in what has been called a `lost decade' in the integration of women in open source [10]. Understanding the success or failure of these and similar activities starts with measuring the participation of females -in terms of both population and level of activity -within a specific open source project. Below we report on our experience with measuring gender diversity.While we focus on OpenStack, a well-known open source project involving thousands of contributors, many of them employed by companies, the proposed analysis and methodology have been developed with the aim of increasing the understanding of diversity and inclusion across the open source ecosystem as a whole.
Why Focus on OpenStack?The OpenStack community has long recognized the importance of gender diversity, reflected in ongoing d...
