Gender Differences in Public Code Contributions: a 50-year Perspective
This addresses the gender imbalance problem in collaborative software development for researchers and practitioners, providing incremental insights into long-term trends.
The study analyzed 1.6 billion commits from 120 million projects over 50 years to examine gender differences in public code contributions, finding that while female contributions remain low overall, there is a stable long-term increase in their proportion.
Gender imbalance in information technology in general, and Free/Open Source Software specifically, is a well-known problem in the field. Still, little is known yet about the large-scale extent and long-term trends that underpin the phenomenon. We contribute to fill this gap by conducting a longitudinal study of the population of contributors to publicly available software source code. We analyze 1.6 billion commits corresponding to the development history of 120 million projects, contributed by 33 million distinct authors over a period of 50 years. We classify author names by gender and study their evolution over time.We show that, while the amount of commits by female authors remains low overall, there is evidence of a stable long-term increase in their proportion over all contributions, providing hope of a more gender-balanced future for collaborative software development.