The GenderMag Project
GenderMag for Open Source: an NSF-funded collaboration
CHS:Large:Gender-inclusive open source through gender-inclusive tools
This is collaborative project involving researchers from Oregon State University and Northern Arizona University funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF 1901031/1900903).
Open source is having a significant impact on society, in the products it produces and the career paths that it facilitates. However, women are vastly underrepresented among open source developers. This is a significant concern to these communities because it prevents them from receiving the benefits of a larger talent pool and of team diversity. The problem is perpetuated when women developers miss the learning and professional growth opportunities that open source software projects provide, and are overlooked when open source contributions are used to make hiring decisions. Our work will help break down these gender-bias barriers in tools and technology used in open source software.
Our goal is to investigate how open source software tools and technologies have gender biases tied with diverse problem-solving styles, and how to remove any such biases.
This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions and redesigns of open source software projects to address the underrepresentation of women.
The redesigns and the process of creating inclusive tools will be empirically evaluated to create a compendium of "best practices" for fixing gender-bias bugs, in both products (what suitable fixes are to such bugs) and processes (how open source software teams can work together to fix gender-bias bugs).
The GenderMag Method is a core piece of this project. We will conduct cognitive walkthroughs with open source software maintainers to uncover gender-bias bugs, and provide feedback to their teams so they can fix these issues.
More details:
Participants
Principal Investigators
Anita Sarma
Lead Investigator (OSU)
Dr. Sarma is an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. Her research includes supporting software development in distributed teams and gender and diversity in software development.
Personal webpageIgor Steinmacher
Principal Investigator (NAU)
Dr. Steinmacher is an Assistant Professor at Northern Arizona University. His research revolves around support of newcomers and inclusion in Open Source Software.
Personal webpageMargaret Burnett
Principal Investigator (OSU)
Dr. Burnett is a Professor at Oregon State University. Her work lies at the intersection of HCI and software engineering. She leads the team that created GenderMag.
Personal webpageMarco A. Gerosa
Principal Investigator (NAU)
Dr. Gerosa is an Associate Professor at Northern Arizona University. His research is related to open source software communities and collaborative systems.
Personal webpageStudents
Bianca Trinkenreich
Ph.D. Student (NAU)
Mariam Guizani
Ph.D. Student (OSU)
Publications
For GenderMag Publications, visit the Research Publications page.
This project in the media/news:
This our project outreach:
(Margaret Burnett) Keynote, ACM International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces (AVI), June 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Keynote, Iberoamerican Conference on Software Engineering (CIbSE 2020), Brazil, May 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Keynote, ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI), March 2020.
Invited talk, Indiana University Colloquium, February 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Keynote, ACM-W Tri-State Women in Computing Conference, Kentucky, Feb. 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Keynote, RIEC International Symposium on Human-Computer Interaction, Tohura University, Japan, January 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Invited Speaker, ACM Education Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Invited talk, Carnegie Mellon University Colloquium, January 2020.
(Margaret Burnett) Invited talk, University of Oregon Colloquium (with Anita Sarma), October 2019.
(Margaret Burnett) Invited talk, Reed College, Oregon Dec 2019.
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