Is the software itself gender biased? OSS tools and gender inclusivity

Description

Gender inclusiveness in software companies is receiving a lot of attention these days, but it overlooks a potentially critical factor: the software itself. Research into how individual differences cluster by gender shows that men and women often work differently with software for problem solving, such as when trying to contribute to OSS communities.

So you need to find out whether and to what extent gender biases exist in the open source tools that your project uses, the tools you develop, or how your project site itself is structured, and you need to discover how to fix it. Anita Sarma outlines a field-tested method based on five facets of statistical gender differences in preferred cognitive styles and presents what the method reveals about open source software tools and infrastructure—namely that the tools themselves are deeply implicated in gender disparities in OSS communities. Along the way, you’ll learn concrete ways in which the OSS community can get involved in removing gender biases from software that OSS produces, facilitating newcomer onboarding and building inclusive communities.