Cracking the Code: Unraveling Gender Disparities in Open-Source Contributions

Abstract

Within the world of open source software (OSS) development, previous research has shown that the success rate of pull requests (PRs) may exhibit gender-related imbalances. In this work, we seek to examine which factors may contribute to this imbalance; we do so by performing a comprehensive study on a corpus of over 50,000 accepted PRs taken from a set of well-known Python projects. We perform both stylometric and quality-based analyses on the submitted PRs by both female and male developers, and we find that the results vary across gender. For example, we found that code written by male developers is more prone to both bugs and blocker issues. Based on our experiences, we propose a set of actionable recommendations, aimed at fostering diversity and equal opportunities within the OSS ecosystem.