Gender Diversity on GitHub Issue Tracking: What's the Difference?

Abstract

This work analyzes female participation in communication on GitHub’s Issue Tracking, based on thematic relevance of posted comments according to the developer’s gender relative to other metrics, such as reputation, participation time on the platform, and number of reported issues. Data from 5 open source communities and 5 communities dedicated to women was analyzed. The results indicate that, on average, the relevance of comments made by women is similar to that of men. However, the study confirms other findings in literature that highlight low levels of female representativeness and participation in projects, with just 22% of comments posted by women and 16% of issues reported by them.