Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities

Canedo, Edna Dias; Bonifácio, Rodrigo; Okimoto, Márcio Vinícius; Serebrenik, Alexander; Pinto, Gustavo; Monteiro, Eduardo

doi:10.1145/3382494.3410682

Cited by 40 publications

(36 citation statements)

References 39 publications

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“…Although the literature has shown that women frequently perform community-centric roles [60], our results from RQ1 (Section 4.1) show that mentor and non-mentor gender distributions are similar. Nevertheless, the literature also underscores the importance of mentorship to onboard women to OSS [70], and that the duration of women's engagement in OSS is negatively affected by the differences in men and women mentors' perspectives about gender personalities; underestimation of women's capabilities by both the open source community at large and women newcomers themselves; and men mentors' lack of awareness about the community's unequal and often harsh treatment of its women members [16]. As part of the soft skills training, OSS communities can discuss the use of gender-inclusive language, adopting a code of conduct, gender-specific strategies, and other strategies to better support women newcomers.…”

Section: Supporting Mentorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being a Mentor in open source projects

Steinmacher

Balali

Trinkenreich

et al. 2021

J Internet Serv Appl

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Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are, the challenges they face, and the strategies they use can help OSS projects better support mentors’ work. In this paper, we employ a two-stage study to comprehensively investigate mentors in OSS. First, we identify the characteristics of mentors in the Apache Software Foundation, a large OSS community, using an online survey. We found that less experienced volunteer contributors are less likely to take on the mentorship role. Second, through interviews with OSS mentors (n=18), we identify the challenges that mentors face and how they mitigate them. In total, we identified 25 general mentorship challenges and 7 sub-categories of challenges regarding task recommendation. We also identified 13 strategies to overcome the challenges related to task recommendation. Our results provide insights for OSS communities, formal mentorship programs, and tool builders who design automated support for task assignment and internship.

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Section: Supporting Mentorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Being a Mentor in open source projects

Steinmacher

Balali

Trinkenreich

et al. 2021

J Internet Serv Appl

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“…4. Acceptance rate of women's contributions in OSS projects Anecdotes about gender bias appear across the literature [48,82], and women have been reported to feel that such biases are to blame for their contributions' comparatively low acceptance rate [14]. We aim to aggregate the scientific evidence about gender bias and understand what impact such biases have on the acceptance of women's contributions.…”

Section: Types Of Contributions That Women Make In Oss Projectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Before searching the selected databases, we conducted exploratory searches using Google Scholar to refine the inclusion and exclusion criteria, the research question, synonyms for the search string, and the information extraction template. From that exploratory search, based on our experience we selected four well-known, relevant studies to act as control papers [14,70,82,87]. In our pilot studies to test the protocol, all four control papers were found.…”

Section: Databases and Searchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Women's Participation in Open Source Software: A Survey of the Literature

Trinkenreich¹,

Wiese²,

Sarma³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Participation of women in Open Source Software (OSS) is very unbalanced, despite various efforts to improve diversity. This is concerning not only because women do not get the chance of career and skill developments afforded by OSS, but also because OSS projects suffer from a lack of diversity of thoughts because of a lack of diversity in their projects. Studies that characterize women's participation and investigate how to attract and retain women 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 Open Source Software. It focuses on women's representation and the demographics of women who contribute to OSS, how they contribute, the acceptance rates of their contributions, their motivations and challenges, and strategies employed by communities to attract and retain women. We identified 51 articles (published between 2005 and 2021) that investigate women's participation in OSS. According to the literature, women represent about 9.8% of OSS contributors; most of them are recent contributors, 20-37 years old, devote less than 5h/week to OSS, and make both non-code and code contributions. Only 5% of projects have women as core developers, and women author less than 5% of pull-requests but have similar or even higher rates of merge acceptance than men.Besides learning new skills and altruism, reciprocity and kinship are motivations especially relevant for women, but can leave if they are not compensated for their contributions. Women's challenges are mainly social, including lack of peer parity and non-inclusive communication from a toxic culture. The literature reports ten strategies, which were mapped to six of the seven challenges. Based on these results, we provide guidelines for future research and practice. CCS Concepts: • Software and its engineering → Software evolution; • Human-centered computing → Open source software; • Social and professional topics → Women.

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“…"Work Practices and Perceptions From Women Core Developers in OS S Com mu nities" by Canedo et al 8 investigates how common female core developers are in open source software (OSS), whether their PRACTITIONERS' DIGEST work practices differ from male core developers, and how they perceive gender bias. The authors mined OSS repositories to identify core developers and their gender and then surveyed the identified female core developers.…”

Section: Women In Open Source Softwarementioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral Science and Diversity in Software Engineering

et al. 2021

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Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities

Cited by 40 publications

References 39 publications

Being a Mentor in open source projects

Being a Mentor in open source projects

Women's Participation in Open Source Software: A Survey of the Literature

Behavioral Science and Diversity in Software Engineering

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