Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Background
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- Distribution of the license: The rights associated with the program must apply to all those whose program is redistributed, without the need to execute an additional license for these parties;
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- License not restricted to other software: The license must not contain restrictions to other software that are distributed with the licensed software;
- Technology-neutral license: No license clause can establish an individual technology or interface style to be applied in the program.
Related Works
3. Systematic Literature Review
- Planning: Aims to identify the real need of the SLR, in other words, the motivation for the execution of research [25]. This phase is composed of the main activities: to define the objective, to prepare the protocol that will guide the SLR in order to minimize biases that can be committed by the researchers, and to evaluate this protocol, with the execution of the test of the research protocol in the data bases;
- Conduction: Performs the application of the search strategy in order to identify and select studies according to the protocol defined in the planning phase. From the set of selected studies the data necessary to compose the results of the work must be extracted and synthesized [25];
- Publication of Results: Prepares the final SLR documentation, containing the description of the results and the answers to the research questions defined in the work protocol. The results, where possible, should be disclosed to potential participants [26].
3.1. Planning of the SLR
3.2. Research Strategy
- ACM Digital Library;
- IEEE Xplore Digital Library;
- DBLP-Computer Science Bibliography.
3.3. Selection Criteria (Inclusion and Exclusion)
- The work must be available in the previously defined digital library;
- The study must have been written in English or Portuguese and published between 2007 and 2019;
- The work must be related to the area of Information Technology or Computing;
- The study must be related to open source software projects and gender diversity or software development project and gender diversity;
- The work can be classified as gray literature, namely, technical reports, preliminary studies, technical specifications, official documents of specific organizations [25].
- Incomplete works (published as a short paper);
- Works that do not present enough information to extract the expected data, thus impairing the quality or relevance of the work [30].
- Step 1: Execution of the search strategy involving the automatic search. A preliminary list of studies should be generated for each data base used, and the reference file (in the .bib extension) should be downloaded to enable SLR management with the aid of the StArt tool. Duplicate entries should be deleted by the tool, while importing the file;
- Step 2: Identification of potentially relevant studies, based on reading the title and abstract. In this step, it should be possible to rule out studies that are clearly irrelevant to the research. In case of doubt about the permanence of some study in the SLR, the next step may assist in this definition;
- Step 3: Reading of the introduction, methodology and conclusion of the pre-selected works, again applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria;
- Step 4: The papers selected in Step 3 should be read in full and the volume of papers resulting from this step should be used to compose the SLR and support the answers to the research questions.
3.4. Conduction of the SLR
3.5. Data Extraction
4. SLR Results Synthesis
4.1. RQ.1. What Are the Possible Problems Causing Women’s Lack of Interest (Engagement) in the Area of Software Development?
4.2. RQ.2. What Are the Possible Solutions to Increase the Engagement of Women in Open Source Software Development Projects?
4.3. RQ.3. What Is the Profile of the Women Professionals Involved in Open Software Development Projects?
- Women continue to have high acceptance rates as they gain experience;
- Women’s pull requests are less probable to meet an immediate need for the project;
- Changes proposed by women are broader;
- The acceptance rates of women are higher in languages such as HTML than in languages like Java or Python;
- 76% of the participating women contribute directly to coding;
- Women have lower acceptance rates when they identify themselves as women.
5. Comparison of Results with Existing Evidence
Threat to Validity
6. Conclusions
Author Contributions
Funding
Conflicts of Interest
References
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RQ | Description |
---|---|
RQ.1 | What are the possible problems causing women’s lack of interest (engagement) in the area of software development? |
RQ.2 | What are the possible solutions to increase the engagement of women in open source software development projects? |
RQ.3 | What is the profile of the women professionals involved in open software development projects? |
Primary Study | Title | Reference | RQ |
---|---|---|---|
S1 | A study of FOSS 2013 survey data using clustering techniques | [31] | 2, 3 |
S2 | Code of conduct in open source projects | [32] | 2 |
S3 | Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams | [11] | 3 |
S4 | Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men | [20] | 1, 3 |
S5 | Gender differences in early free and open source software Joining Process | [33] | |
S6 | Gendered behavior as a disadvantage in open source software development | [34] | 1, 2 |
S7 | Gendered patterns of politeness in free/libre open source software development | [35] | |
S8 | Joining and Socialization in Open Source Women’s Groups: An Exploratory Study of KDE-Women | [36] | 2 |
S9 | Making a Difference: An Overview of Humanitarian Free Open Source Systems | [37] | 2 |
S10 | On older adults in free/open source software: reflections of contributors and community leaders | [38] | 1 |
S11 | Open Source Barriers to Entry, Revisited: A Socio-technical Perspective | [39] | 1, 2, 3 |
S12 | OpenStack Gender Diversity Report | [13] | 1 |
S13 | Patches don’t have gender: What is not open in open source software | [40] | |
S14 | Some of All Human Knowledge: Gender and Participation in Peer Production | [41] | 2 |
S15 | Women contributions to open source software innovation: A social constructivist perspective | [42] | |
S16 | Gender diversity in STEM disciplines: A multiple factor problem | [16] | 1, 2 |
S17 | A model for increasing gender diversity in technology | [15] | 1, 2, 3 |
S18 | Do female motives for enrolling vary according to stem profile? | [17] | 1, 2, 3 |
S19 | Toward more gender diversity in CS through an artificial intelligence summer program for high school girls | [18] | 2 |
S20 | FLOSS Participants’ Perceptions about Gender and Inclusiveness: A Survey | [43] | 1, 3 |
S21 | Why are some STEM fields more gender balanced than others? | [44] | 2, 3 |
S22 | Diversity and Decorum in Open Source Communities | [45] | 2 |
S23 | Gender in Open Source Software: What the Tools Tell | [12] | 2 |
S24 | How Long and How Much: What to Expect from Summer of Code Participants | [46] | 1, 2, 3 |
ID | Good Practices | Reference |
---|---|---|
1 | Setting quotas for women has become a usual practice. The precaution that must be taken into account regarding this type of action is the need to observe that there is no decrease of feminine behavior characteristics and stereotypes are not created on the competence of this group of professionals. | [34] |
2 | Initiatives to assist in the development of leadership skills and technical performance of women can be adopted. | [36] |
3 | Transparency regarding the organizational culture where the project is inserted as well as the adopted work policy. This type of attitude provides conditions for members to identify characteristics of the project’s work environment even before deciding to participate in the team. It is expected that this will increase the degree of affinity between personal and professional values. | [36] |
4 | The adoption of a code of conduct in open software projects is an emerging phenomenon to deal with diversity issues and provide a more secure and inclusive community. A code of conduct simply establishes basic rules for communication between participants, outlines mechanisms and attempts to code the spirit of a community, in a way that any person may contribute comfortably, regardless, for instance, gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation. An active awareness of community members about their code of conduct is essential to the effectiveness of its application. Behavioral guidelines should be emphasized as well as approaches in case of violation, which can range from a period of time to take appropriate corrective action, or even the banishment of certain project members. | [32] |
5 | Anti-harassment policies and active moderators in communities assessing existing interactions can also be used. | [41] |
6 | Women’s support groups that serve as a support network for marginalized participants can be implemented. | [41] |
7 | Projects that are inserted in the context of Humanitarian Free Open-Source Software (HFOSS) and which have philanthropic objectives, due to their altruistic nature, have been seen as a way, not yet proven, to engage women developers in open software development projects. | [37] |
8 | The need to learn new skills has been pointed out as a motivator for women to enter, engage and persist in the world of open software development projects. | [31] |
9 | Continuous monitoring of female participation can be used to generate metrics. Such data can be used to achieve a better understanding of the female profile, identifying ways to improve collaboration with project team leaders and other community leaders. Generated documentation can facilitate the publication and sharing of best practices for the ongoing support of women in working groups. | [13] |
Percentage of Women | Leadership Poles |
---|---|
7% | Project committee members |
8% | Project team leader |
9% | Project board directors |
7% | Technical committee |
8% | Working group leaders |
23% | Project ambassadors |
Feature | Result |
---|---|
Relationship Type | 35% of the female participants were single, over 11% do not live with their partners, while 3% live with their partners. 3% are married and 0.09% are separated from their partners |
Existence of children | 20% of the women interviewed had children, while 79% did not |
Current condition of employment | Around 5% of the participants were unemployed |
Country of residence | 40% of female participants work or reside in the US, 6% in Germany, 6% in India, 5% in the United Kingdom and 4% in Australia |
Degree | 81% of women who contribute are at least undergraduates. The number of participants who have a PhD is about 10% of the total |
English language knowledge | 82% of the contributing women are at least proficient in the English language |
Job satisfaction level | 32% felt they love their current job, while 5% wanted a more interesting job than the current one |
Evaluation | 28% consider themselves as part of the Open Source Software community |
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Share and Cite
Dias Canedo, E.; Acco Tives, H.; Bogo Marioti, M.; Fagundes, F.; Siqueira de Cerqueira, J.A. Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects. Information 2019, 10, 309. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100309
Dias Canedo E, Acco Tives H, Bogo Marioti M, Fagundes F, Siqueira de Cerqueira JA. Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects. Information. 2019; 10(10):309. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100309
Chicago/Turabian StyleDias Canedo, Edna, Heloise Acco Tives, Madianita Bogo Marioti, Fabiano Fagundes, and José Antonio Siqueira de Cerqueira. 2019. "Barriers Faced by Women in Software Development Projects" Information 10, no. 10: 309. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10100309