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Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

Published: 18 April 2015 Publication History

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 offline 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.

Supplementary Material

Erratum (chi2015erratum.pdf)
Erratum for CHI '15 paper: Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams. July 8, 2015

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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '15: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2015
4290 pages
ISBN:9781450331456
DOI:10.1145/2702123
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 18 April 2015

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Author Tags

  1. diversity
  2. gender
  3. github
  4. open source
  5. productivity

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CHI '15
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CHI '15: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 18 - 23, 2015
Seoul, Republic of Korea

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CHI '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 486 of 2,120 submissions, 23%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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  • (2024)Human-Centered Interventions to Empower Gender Diversity in Software EngineeringProceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3661167.3661182(494-499)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
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