Abstract
Computer science is a predominantly male field of study. Women face barriers while trying to insert themselves in the study of computer science. Those barriers extend to when women are exposed to the professional area of computer science. Despite decades of social fights for gender equity in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education and in computer science in general, few women participate in computer science, and some of the reasons include gender bias and lack of support for women when choosing a computer science career. Open source software development has been increasingly used by companies seeking the competitive advantages gained by team diversity. This diversification of the characteristics of team members includes, for example, the age of the participants, the level of experience, education and knowledge in the area, and their gender. In open source software projects women are underrepresented and a series of biases are involved in their participation. This paper conducts a systematic literature review with the objective of finding factors that could assist in increasing women’s interest in contributing to open source communities and software development projects. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) identification of factors that cause women’s lack of interest (engagement), (ii) possible solutions to increase the engagement of this public, (iii) to outline the profile of professional women who are participating in open source software projects and software development projects. The main findings of this research reveal that women are underrepresented in software development projects and in open source software projects. They represent less than 10% of the total developers and the main causes of this underrepresentation may be associated with their workplace conditions, which reflect male gender bias.
Highlights
The global economy is highly dependent on software, and it is becoming more common for companies that do not have software development as their end product to carrying out this activity to support their business [1]
Planning: Aims to identify the real need of the systematic literature review (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
Academia and industry efforts are crucial to promote a change in the volume of female participation in this type of project, and this work, through a systematic review of literature in the main libraries of scientific works in the area of computation, sought to assist in the finding of factors that may aid in a higher rate of women’s interest in open software development projects
Summary
The global economy is highly dependent on software, and it is becoming more common for companies that do not have software development as their end product to carrying out this activity to support their business [1]. Multiple studies show that women are underrepresented in almost all fields of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) [4] This gender gap is present at higher education institutions in both student numbers and academic staff [5]. The hiring of women has increased, hiring for companies’ leadership positions has decreased by 25.9% (−3.5 points) from the previous report [9] In this context, this paper proposes a systematic literature review (SLR) in the main databases of scientific works in the computation field with the aim of discovering factors that can help increase the rate of women’s interest in OSS projects and software development projects. Increasing the number of women in STEM may lead to an increase in the number of women in open source software projects and software development projects.
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