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Diversity in open-source software

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Researchers and journalists have found a higher gender disparity and lower racial and ethnic diversity in the open-source-software movement than in computing overall, but a higher proportion of sexual minorities and transgender people than in the United States population.

Background

Open source software (OSS) is a non-traditional model of software development where source code is created by a number of virtual volunteers and can be modified by other members of the community.[1] The number of developers working on an OSS project can range from few to thousands but often in many projects, only developers deemed trustworthy by the project maintainers will have the privilege of making additions to the main repository.[2]

The software developed is freely available for use and the number of users varies from few to many millions.[2] Over time, as OSS has continued to grow and offer new solutions to everyday problems, an increasingly diverse user base has continued to evolve. With time and growing usage of OSS projects as new solutions, brings an increasingly diverse user base. In comparison, since the inception of OSS in early 1990s, the community of OSS developers has remained dominated by young men.[3]

Research on possible causes

In GitHub's 2017 survey, 50% of the 5,500 respondents claimed they had witnessed toxic interactions while working on open-source projects, and that 18% of them had suffered through a negative interaction. Dismissive responses, conflict, and unwelcoming language were cited as the third, fourth, and sixth biggest problems encountered in open-source respectively.[4]

In 2017, 3 million "pull requests" were examined from 330,000 GitHub users, of which 21,000 were women, and found code written by women to be accepted more often (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%). However in the cases of developers who were not insiders of a project and whose gender was assumed identifiable by username or profile picture, code by men was approved at higher rates. The researchers conducting the study concluded that gender bias is among plausible explanations of this effect.[5]

Diversity

Gender diversity

The more recent entering of women into the OSS movement has been suggested as the cause of their under-representation in the field; of all women who had contributed to OSS up until 2013, 38.45% of them began to do so from 2009 to 2013, in comparison to only 18.75% of men.[6]

The gender ratio in open source is even greater than the field-wide gender disparity in computing. This has been found by a number of surveys:

  • A 2002 survey of 2,784 open-source-software developers found that 1.1% of them were women.[7]
  • A 2013 survey of 2,183 open-source contributors found that 81.4% were men and 10.4% were women.[8] This survey included both software contributors and non-software contributors and women were much more likely to be non-software contributors.[9]
  • A 2017 survey of 5,500 contributors to projects on GitHub found that 95% of contributors were men and 3% were women.[10]

Racial and ethnic diversity

Writing for the NPR, journalist Gene Demby considers Black people and Latinos to be underrepresented in the open source software development.[11]

Sexual minority and transgender diversity

A 2017 survey of 5,500 GitHub contributors found that 1% identified as transgender, 1% as non-binary, and 7% as lesbian, gay, bisexual, asexual, or another minority sexual orientation[4] Writing for Wired, journalist Klint Finley contrasted this to the finding of a 2017 Gallup poll that 4.1% of the United States population identify as LGBT.[14][10] A 2018 survey conducted by Stack Overflow found that out of their sample of 100,000, 6.7% identified as LGBT+, and 0.9% as non-binary or transgender.[15]

Organizations and Programs

LinuxChix is a women-oriented Linux community founded in 1999 encouraging participation in Linux OSS by creating conflict-free and nurturing environments for women to do so.[16][17] Open-source projects and organizations such as Arch Linux, Bitcoin, BonitaSoft, Debian [1], Drupal, Fedora [2], FreeNX, GNOME [3], KDE [4], Mozilla [5], PHP, Ubuntu [6] have or have had initiatives directed to women to support their participation.[18]

References

  1. ^ Daniel, Sherae; Agarwal, Ritu; Stewart, Katherine J. (2013). "The Effects of Diversity in Global, Distributed Collectives: A Study of Open Source Project Success". Information Systems Research. 24 (2): 312–333. doi:10.1287/isre.1120.0435. ISSN 1047-7047. JSTOR 42004307.
  2. ^ a b von Krogh, Georg; von Hippel, Eric (2003-07-01). "Special issue on open source software development". Research Policy. 32 (7): 1149–1157. doi:10.1016/S0048-7333(03)00054-4. ISSN 0048-7333.
  3. ^ Kuechler, Victor; Gilbertson, Claire; Jensen, Carlos (2012). "Gender Differences in Early Free and Open Source Software Joining Process". In Hammouda, Imed; Lundell, Björn; Mikkonen, Tommi; Scacchi, Walt (eds.). Open Source Systems: Long-Term Sustainability. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Vol. 378. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. pp. 78–93. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33442-9_6. ISBN 978-3-642-33442-9.
  4. ^ a b "Open Source Survey". GitHub. Retrieved 2019-07-01.
  5. ^ Terrell, Josh; Kofink, Andrew; Middleton, Justin; Rainear, Clarissa; Murphy-Hill, Emerson; Parnin, Chris; Stallings, Jon (2017-05-01). "Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men". PeerJ Computer Science. 3: e111. doi:10.7717/peerj-cs.111. ISSN 2376-5992. S2CID 215729690.
  6. ^ Robles, Gregorio; Reina, Laura Arjona; González-Barahona, Jesús M.; Domínguez, Santiago Dueñas (2016). "Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The Situation in the 2010s". In Crowston, Kevin; Hammouda, Imed; Lundell, Björn; Robles, Gregorio; Gamalielsson, Jonas; Lindman, Juho (eds.). Open Source Systems: Integrating Communities. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Vol. 472. Cham: Springer International Publishing. pp. 163–173. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_13. ISBN 978-3-319-39225-7.
  7. ^ Ghosh, Rishab Aiyer; Glott, Ruediger; Krieger, Bernhard; Robles, Gregorio (June 2002). "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study" (PDF). International Institute of Infonomics University of Maastricht, The Netherlands.
  8. ^ Robles, Gregorio; Arjona, Laura; Serebrenik, Alexander; Vasilescu, Bogdan; González-Barahona, Jesús M. (2014). "FLOSS 2013: A Survey Dataset about Free Software Contributors: Challenges for Curating, Sharing, and Combining" (PDF). Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories - MSR 2014. Mining Software Repositories Conference. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). pp. 396–399. doi:10.1145/2597073.2597129. ISBN 9781450328630.
  9. ^ Robles, Gregorio; Arjona, Laura; González-Barahona, Jesús M.; Dueñas Domínguez, Santiago (2016). "Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The situation in the 2010s". Open Source Systems: Integrating Communities. IFIP International Conference on Open Source Systems. IFIP Advances in Information and Communication Technology. Vol. 472. Springer. pp. 163–173. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_13. ISBN 978-3-319-39224-0.
  10. ^ a b Klint, Finley (2 June 2017). "Diversity in Open Source Is Even Worse Than in Tech Overall". Wired.
  11. ^ Demby, Gene (2013-12-05). "Why Isn't Open Source A Gateway For Coders Of Color?". NPR. Retrieved 2020-10-03.
  12. ^ a b "Open Source Survey". Open Source Survey. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
  13. ^ "Employed persons by detailed occupation, sex, race, and Hispanic or Latino ethnicity". www.bls.gov. Retrieved 2021-02-06.
  14. ^ Inc, Gallup (2017-01-11). "In U.S., More Adults Identifying as LGBT". Gallup.com. Retrieved 2024-12-08. {{cite web}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  15. ^ "Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2018". Stack Overflow. Retrieved 2019-07-01.
  16. ^ Kraut, Robert E.; Resnick, Paul (2012-03-23). Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-29739-4.
  17. ^ "She-geeks confess love for Linux". ZDNET. Retrieved 2024-12-08.
  18. ^ Singh, Vandana; Brandon, William (2019). Bordeleau, Francis; Sillitti, Alberto; Meirelles, Paulo; Lenarduzzi, Valentina (eds.). "Open Source Software Community Inclusion Initiatives to Support Women Participation". Open Source Systems. Cham: Springer International Publishing: 68–79. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-20883-7_7. ISBN 978-3-030-20883-7.
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