Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
5-2023
Abstract
The open-source community uses the GitHub platform to exchange and share software applications and services of interest. This paper aims to identify the open-source community’s interest in gender-related projects on GitHub. Our findings create research opportunities and identify resources by the open-source community that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. We use data mining to identify GitHub projects that focus on gender-related topics. We apply quantitative and qualitative methodologies to examine the projects’ attributes and to classify them within a gender social structure and a gender bias taxonomy. We aim to understand the open-source community’s efforts and interests in gender topics through active projects. In this paper, we report on a preponderance of projects focusing on specific gender topics and identify those with a narrow focus. We examine projects focusing on gender bias and how they address this non-inclusive behaviour. Results show a propensity of GitHub projects focusing on recognising and detecting an individual’s gender and a dearth of projects concentrating on the cultural expectations placed on women and men. In the gender bias domain, the projects mainly focus on occupational biases. These findings raise opportunities to address the limited focus of GitHub on gender-related topics through developing projects that mitigate exclusive behaviours.
Keywords
data mining, Gender, GitHub projects, open-source community
Discipline
Software Engineering
Research Areas
Software and Cyber-Physical Systems
Publication
2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), Melbourne, Australia, May 14-15
First Page
68
Last Page
79
ISBN
9798350337341
Identifier
10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00016
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Citation
GARCIA, Rita; TREUDE, Christoph; and LA, Wendy.
Towards understanding the open source interest in gender-related GitHub projects. (2023). 2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), Melbourne, Australia, May 14-15. 68-79.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/8873
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1109/CHASE58964.2023.00016