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Paradise unplugged: identifying barriers for female participation on stack overflow

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Chris ParninAuthors Info & Claims

FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

Pages 846 - 857

https://doi.org/10.1145/2950290.2950331

Published: 01 November 2016 Publication History

Abstract

It is no secret that females engage less in programming fields than males. However, in online communities, such as Stack Overflow, this gender gap is even more extreme: only 5.8% of contributors are female. In this paper, we use a mixed-methods approach to identify contribution barriers females face in online communities. Through 22 semi-structured interviews with a spectrum of female users ranging from non-contributors to a top 100 ranked user of all time, we identified 14 barriers preventing them from contributing to Stack Overflow. We then conducted a survey with 1470 female and male developers to confirm which barriers are gender related or general problems for everyone. Females ranked five barriers significantly higher than males. A few of these include doubts in the level of expertise needed to contribute, feeling overwhelmed when competing with a large number of users, and limited awareness of site features. Still, there were other barriers that equally impacted all Stack Overflow users or affected particular groups, such as industry programmers. Finally, we describe several implications that may encourage increased participation in the Stack Overflow community across genders and other demographics.

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Cited By

Frluckaj HStevens NHowison JDabbish L(2024)Paradoxes of Openness: Trans Experiences in Open Source SoftwareProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36870478:CSCW2(1-24)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687047
Fang ZHuang Y(2024)"Math is a pain!": Understanding challenges and needs of the Machine Learning community on Stack OverflowProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869908:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686990
Storey MRusso DNovielli NKobayashi TWang D(2024)A Disruptive Research Playbook for Studying Disruptive InnovationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367817233:8(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
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Index Terms

Paradise unplugged: identifying barriers for female participation on stack overflow
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
    1. Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

FSE 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering

November 2016

1156 pages

ISBN:9781450342186

DOI:10.1145/2950290

General Chair:
Thomas Zimmermann
Microsoft Research, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Jane Cleland-Huang
University of Notre Dame, USA
,
Zhendong Su
University of California at Davis, USA

Copyright © 2016 ACM.

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Published: 01 November 2016

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FSE'16: 24nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering

November 13 - 18, 2016

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687047
Fang ZHuang Y(2024)"Math is a pain!": Understanding challenges and needs of the Machine Learning community on Stack OverflowProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36869908:CSCW2(1-35)Online publication date: 8-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3686990
Storey MRusso DNovielli NKobayashi TWang D(2024)A Disruptive Research Playbook for Studying Disruptive InnovationsACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367817233:8(1-29)Online publication date: 15-Jul-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3678172
Zolduoarrati ELicorish SStanger N(2024)Harmonising Contributions: Exploring Diversity in Software Engineering through CQA Mining on Stack OverflowACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology10.1145/367245333:7(1-54)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2024
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