Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

TitleGender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams
Publication TypeConference Proceedings
Year of Publication2015
AuthorsVasilescu, B, Posnett, D, Ray, B, van den Brand, MGJ, Serebrenik, A, Devanbu, P, Filkov, V
Secondary TitleProceedings of the 2015 ACM CHI
Keywordsgender, github, team
Abstract

Software development is usually a collaborative venture.
Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no exception; indeed,
by design, the OSS approach can accommodate teams
that are more open, geographically distributed, and dynamic
than commercial teams. This, we find, leads to OSS teams
that are quite diverse. Team diversity, predominantly in of-
fline groups, is known to correlate with team output, mostly
with positive effects. How about in OSS?
Using GITHUB, the largest publicly available collection of
OSS projects, we studied how gender and tenure diversity
relate to team productivity and turnover. Using regression
modeling of GITHUB data and the results of a survey, we
show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and
significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a
sizable fraction of the data variability. These results can
inform decision making on all levels, leading to better outcomes
in recruiting and performance.

URLhttp://bvasiles.github.io/papers/chi15.pdf
Full Text
AttachmentSize
PDF icon chi15.pdf192.31 KB
Taxonomy upgrade extras: