Gender imbalance is a well-known phenomenon observed throughout sciences which is particularly severe in software development and Free/Open Source Software communities. Little is know yet about the geography of this phenomenon in particular when considering large scales for both its time and space dimensions. We contribute to fill this gap with a longitudinal study of the population of contributors to publicly available software source code. We analyze the development history of 160 million software projects for a total of 2.2 billion commits contributed by 43 million distinct authors over a period of 50 years. We classify author names by gender using name frequencies and author geographical locations using heuristics based on email addresses and time zones. We study the evolution over time of contributions to public code by gender and by world region. For the world overall, we confirm previous findings about the low but steadily increasing ratio of contributions by female authors. When breaking down by world regions we find that the long-term growth of female participation is a worldwide phenomenon. We also observe a decrease in the ratio of female participation during the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that women's ability to contribute to public code has been more hindered than that of men.
翻译:在软件开发和自由/开放源码软件社区中,性别不平衡是一个众所周知的现象,在科学界中,这种现象尤其严重,在软件开发和自由/开放源码软件社区中尤为严重。目前还不知道这种现象的地理格局,特别是在考虑其时间和空间方面的大规模规模时,我们通过对公开的软件源码的提供者人口进行纵向研究来填补这一差距。我们分析了在50年期间由4 300万不同作者投入的总共22亿个软件项目的开发历史。我们使用电子邮件地址和时区对地名和作者地理位置进行性别分类。我们研究了随着时间的推移,按性别和按世界区域对公共代码的贡献的演变。我们从总体上肯定了以前关于女性作者贡献比例低但稳步上升的调查结果。在按世界区域分类时,我们发现妇女参与长期增长是一种世界现象。我们还观察到,在COVID-19大流行病期间,女性参与率下降,这表明妇女对公共代码的贡献能力比男性受到更多的阻碍。