Characterizating the Participation of the LGBTQIA+ Community on GitHub
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5753/jserd.2025.4142Keywords:
Diversity, LGBTQIA , Repository mining, Profiles, InteractionAbstract
Representation and inclusion are ongoing concerns in Software Engineering. To address this issue, previous studies present data and discuss strategies to mitigate inequality in team assembly. However, it is still unclear how these concerns enable the inclusion of developers belonging to minority groups in open-source projects. In particular, little is known about the participation of people from the LGBTQIA+ community in the development of popular GitHub projects. Therefore, this study aims to characterize the participation of this community, based on the collection of 4K user profiles and almost 58K repositories. We also seek to understand the behavior and the interaction of these users within this context, as well as to shed light on the creation of strategies that promote greater inclusion. As a result, it was observed that the technical profile of the users is far from that of the general developer community, despite their active participation in popular JavaScript and Python repositories. The social profile is isolated, with few user interactions, although there is a concentration in specific areas on the platform's map.
Downloads
References
Aberdour, M. (2007). Achieving quality in open-source software. IEEE Software, 24(1):58–64.
Albusays, K., Bjorn, P., Dabbish, L., Ford, D., Murphy-Hill, E., Serebrenik, A., and Storey, M.-A. (2021). The diversity crisis in software development. IEEE Software, 38(2):19–25.
Almarzouq, M., Alzaidan, A., and AlDallal, J. (2020). Mining github for research and education: challenges and opportunities. International Journal of Web Information Systems, ahead-of-print.
Aué, J., Haisma, M., Tómasdóttir, K. F., and Bacchelli, A. (2016). Social diversity and growth levels of open source software projects on github. In Proceedings of the 10th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, pages 1–6.
Bosu, A. and Sultana, K. Z. (2019). Diversity and inclusion in open source software (oss) projects: Where do we stand? In 2019 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM), pages 1–11.
Casalnuovo, C., Vasilescu, B., Devanbu, P., and Filkov, V. (2015). Developer onboarding in github: the role of prior social links and language experience. In Proceedings of the 2015 10th Joint Meeting on Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 817–828.
DuBow, W. M., Jones, S., Sexton, S., and Tadimalla, S. Y. (2024). Broadening participation in computing education: Advancing lgbtqia+ voices. In Proceedings of the 55th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2, SIGCSE 2024, page 1529–1530, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Dutta, R., Costa, D. E., Shihab, E., and Tajmel, T. (2023). Diversity awareness in software engineering participant research. SEIS - Software Engineering in Society, ahead-of-print.
Eaton, M. E. (2018). A comparative analysis of the use of github by librarians and non-librarians. Evidence Based Library and Information Practice, 13(2):27–48.
Etaiwi, W. and Naymat, G. (2017). The impact of applying different preprocessing steps on review spam detection. Procedia Computer Science, 113:273–279. The 8th International Conference on Emerging Ubiquitous Systems and Pervasive Networks (EUSPN 2017) / The 7th International Conference on Current and Future Trends of Information and Communication Technologies in Healthcare (ICTH2017) / Affiliated Workshops.
Garcia, R., Treude, C., and La, W. (2023). Towards understanding the open source interest in gender-related github projects. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.09727.
Gila, A. R., Jaafa, J., Omar, M., and Tunio, M. Z. (2014). Impact of personality and gender diversity on software development teams’ performance. In 2014 International Conference on Computer, Communications, and Control Technology (I4CT), pages 261–265.
GitHub Octoverse (2022). Octoverse: Top programming languages. Website. Acesso em: 24 de maio de 2023.
Guzman, E., Azócar, D., and Li, Y. (2014). Sentiment analysis of commit comments in github: an empirical study. In Proceedings of the 11th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories, MSR 2014, page 352–355, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Haddi, E., Liu, X., and Shi, Y. (2013). The role of text preprocessing in sentiment analysis. Procedia Computer Science, 17:26–32. First International Conference on Information Technology and Quantitative Management.
Hu, Y., Wang, S., Ren, Y., and Choo, K.-K. R. (2018). User influence analysis for github developer social networks. Expert Systems with Applications, 108:108–118.
Imtiaz, N., Middleton, J., Chakraborty, J., Robson, N., Bai, G., and Murphy-Hill, E. (2019). Investigating the effects of gender bias on github. In 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 700–711.
Janzen, D. S., Bahrami, S., Silva, B. C. d., and Falessi, D. (2018). A reflection on diversity and inclusivity efforts in a software engineering program. In 2018 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), pages 1–9.
Kumar, A., Khare, M., and Tiwari, S. (2022). Sentiment analysis of developers’ comments on github repository: A study. In 2022 14th International Conference on Advanced Computational Intelligence (ICACI), pages 91–98.
Lee, E., Rustam, F., Washington, P. B., Barakaz, F. E., Aljedaani, W., and Ashraf, I. (2022). Racism detection by analyzing differential opinions through sentiment analysis of tweets using stacked ensemble gcr-nn model. IEEE Access, 10:9717–9728.
Montandon, J. E., Valente, M. T., and Silva, L. L. (2021). Mining the technical roles of github users. Information and Software Technology, 131:106485.
Paiva, E., Carvalho, G., Mayrink, J., Maruch, M., Felix, P., Pacheco, G., and Xavier, L. (2023). Caracterização da população lgbtqia+ na plataforma github. In Anais do XI Workshop de Visualização, Evolução e Manutenção de Software, pages 16–20, Porto Alegre, RS, Brasil. SBC.
Rehman, I., Wang, D., Kula, R. G., Ishio, T., and Matsumoto, K. (2020). Newcomer candidate: Characterizing contributions of a novice developer to github.
Richard, T. S., Wiese, E. S., and Rakamarić, Z. (2022). An lgbtq-inclusive problem set in discrete mathematics. In Proceedings of the 53rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 1, pages 682–688.
Saxena, R. and Pedanekar, N. (2017). I know what you coded last summer: Mining candidate expertise from github repositories. In Companion of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW ’17 Companion, page 299–302, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Shimada, N., Xiao, T., Hata, H., Treude, C., and Matsumoto, K. (2022). Github sponsors: exploring a new way to contribute to open source. In Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, ICSE ’22, page 1058–1069, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Sultana, S., Uddin, G., and Bosu, A. (2024). Assessing the influence of toxic and gender discriminatory communication on perceptible diversity in oss projects.
van der Meulen, M. J. and Revilla, M. A. (2008). The effectiveness of software diversity in a large population of programs. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 34(6):753–764.
Vasilescu, B., Posnett, D., Ray, B., van den Brand, M. G., Serebrenik, A., Devanbu, P., and Filkov, V. (2015a). Gender and tenure diversity in github teams. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3789–3798.
Vasilescu, B., Posnett, D., Ray, B., van den Brand, M. G., Serebrenik, A., Devanbu, P., and Filkov, V. (2015b). Gender and tenure diversity in github teams. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI ’15, page 3789–3798, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Wall, S. (2023). The development of the LGBT+ community in the UK in the last 50 years, page 17–27. Routledge.
Wang, J. and Hejazi Moghadam, S. (2017). Diversity barriers in k-12 computer science education: Structural and social. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 615–620.
Wang, Y., Wang, L., Hu, H., Jiang, J., Kuang, H., and Tao, X. (2022). The influence of sponsorship on open-source software developers’ activities on github. In 2022 IEEE 46th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), pages 924–933.
Zhao, S., Xia, X., Fitzgerald, B., Li, X., Lenarduzzi, V., Taibi, D., Wang, R., Wang, W., and Tian, C. (2024). Openrank leaderboard: Motivating open source collaborations through social network evaluation in alibaba. In Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice, ICSE-SEIP ’24, page 346–357, New York, NY, USA. Association for Computing Machinery.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Erick Vinicius Oliveira de Paiva, Guilherme Luiz Carvalho Pinto, João Pedro Mayrink de Jesus, Maria Clara Sales Jabali Maruch, Pedro Vítor Felix da Costa, Gabriel de Oliveira Campos Pacheco, Jose Laerte Pires Xavier Junior
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
