Impact of Gender on OSS File Contributions

We examine how gender impacts the use of specific programming languages, as analyzed across a stratified sample of 100k unique software developers from the World of Code (WoC) archive. A total of 50,000 male and 50,000 female developers are identified using the name-to-gender inference tool WikiGender-Sort. The top fifteen programming languages according to the 2024 StackOverflow Developer survey are considered. For each developer, we count the number of files that are edited in each programming language and compute the median across gender categories. Men and women tend to edit the same number of files among most programming languages, with the exception of developers using C#, C, Go, and Rust, which had more edits among men.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-02-18
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3641555.3705198
Primary Topic
Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

Impact of Gender on OSS File Contributions

Leticia Torres, Amber L. Garcia, Michael L. Collard, Heather M. Guarnera
Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
article

Impact of Gender on OSS File Contributions

Leticia Torres, Amber L. Garcia, Michael L. Collard, Heather M. Guarnera
article en

Abstract

We examine how gender impacts the use of specific programming languages, as analyzed across a stratified sample of 100k unique software developers from the World of Code (WoC) archive. A total of 50,000 male and 50,000 female developers are identified using the name-to-gender inference tool WikiGender-Sort. The top fifteen programming languages according to the 2024 StackOverflow Developer survey are considered. For each developer, we count the number of files that are edited in each programming language and compute the median across gender categories. Men and women tend to edit the same number of files among most programming languages, with the exception of developers using C#, C, Go, and Rust, which had more edits among men.

University of Akron (US), College of Wooster (US)
Gender equality
Openalex Percentile: Top 99%
Hate Speech and Cyberbullying Detection
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