Is perceived gender related to contributions and standing in open-source software projects?

Abstract

To date, the percentage of female developers that actively contribute to open-source software (OSS) projects is less than 10%. In recent years, researchers started searching for reasons for this imbalance. A question that arises in this space is how the (perceived) gender of a developer influences their contributions and standing in the organizational hierarchy of a project. Addressing this question, we have analyzed 20 popular OSS projects on GitHub. We found that the (perceived) gender of developers has only a negligible association with their project contributions (e.g., number of pull requests). In the same vein, women and men take similar positions in the organizational hierarchy, except for the top 10%, where men are still over-represented. So, while our results show a certain degree of gender balance with regard to contributions and standing, the leadership positions of the projects are still male-dominated. This suggests that further countermeasures against gender imbalance shall be directed toward the top of the organizational hierarchy.