Please Don't Go -- A Comprehensive Approach to Increase Women's Participation in Open Source Software
It addresses gender diversity issues in OSS communities, which is a domain-specific problem, but the approach appears incremental as it builds on existing efforts.
This research tackles the problem of low women's participation in Open Source Software (OSS) by investigating career pathways and motivations to develop attraction and retention strategies, with plans to evaluate their impact through empirical studies.
Women represent less than 24% of employees in the software development industry and experience various types of prejudice and bias. Despite various efforts to increase diversity and multi-gendered participation, women are even more underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. In my PhD, I investigate the following question: How can OSS communities increase women's participation in their projects? I will identify different OSS career pathways and develop a holistic view of women's motivations to join or leave OSS, as well as their definitions of success. Based on this empirical investigation, I will work together with the Linux Foundation to design attraction and retention strategies focused on women. Before and after implementing the strategies, I will conduct empirical studies to evaluate the state of the practice and understand the implications of the strategies.