User:ReneeMagnan/Diversity in open-source software

Background
Open source software (OSS) is a non-traditional model of software development, where source code is created by a number of virtual volunteers and can be modified by other members of the community. The number of developers working on an OSS project can range from few to thousands but often in many projects, only developers deemed trustworthy by the project maintainers will have the privilege of making additions to the authorized code.

The software developed is freely available for use and the number of users varies from few to many millions. Over time, as OSS has continued to grow and offer new solutions to everyday problems, an increasingly diverse user base has continued to evolve. With time and growing usage of OSS projects as new solutions, brings an increasingly diverse user base. In comparison, since the creation of OSS in early 1990's, the community of OSS developers has remained dominated by young men.

Gender Bias
In 2017, 3 million "pull requests" were examined from 330,000 GitHub users, 21,000 of those were women, and found code written by women to be accepted more often (78.6%) than code written by men (74.6%). In the cases of developers who were not insiders of a project and those whose gender was assumed identifiable by username or profile picture, code by men was approved at higher rates. The presence of gender bias and its effect on lack of gender diversity within OSS communities is believed true by the researches involved in this project.

The more recent entering of women into the OSS movement has been suggested as the cause of their underrepresentation in the field; of all women who had contributed to OSS up until 2013, 38.45% of them began to do so from 2009-2013, in comparison to only 18.75% of men.

Gender diversity

 * According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2020, around 21.1% of professional computer programmers were women.

Race diversity

 * Of 5,500 Open Source developers surveyed in 2017, the representation of immigrants, from and to anywhere in the world, was 26%.
 * While 37.8% of professional computer programmers in the U.S. workforce identified as ethnic or national minorities in 2017, only 16% did in Open Source.
 * In 2020, the ratio of professional computer programers identifying as ethnic or national minorities was 41.2%, only 12.9% of such minorities identified as Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino.
 * According to the U.S. Census Bureau in 2020, of the 417 professional computer programmers employed in 2020, 63.9% were white, 6.3% Black/African American, 28.3% Asian and 6.6% of Hispanic/Latino ethnicity.

Organizations
LinuxChix is a women-oriented Linux community encouraging participation in Linux OSS by creating conflict-free and nurturing environments for women to do so. The diversity initiative, EquitableTech, targets minorities in OSS by offering skill training for Black and Latino computer science students with goal of increasing diversity in OSS. Trans*H4CK was the first transgender hackathon with goal of bringing awareness to issues specific to the transgender community. After launching in 2013, it has increased visibility of transgender technologists and entrepreneurs in the technology industry.