Impact of Gender on OSS File Contributions
Leilani Torres, Heather M. Guarnera, Michael L. Collard, Amber L. Garcia · 2025
We examine how gender impacts the use of specific programming languages, as analyzed across a stratified sample of 100k unique software developers from the World of Code (WoC) archive. A total of 50,000 male and 50,000 female developers are identified using the name-to-gender inference tool WikiGender-Sort. The top fifteen programming languages according to the 2024 StackOverflow Developer survey are considered. For each developer, we count the number of files that are edited in each programming language and compute the median across gender categories. Men and women tend to edit the same number of files among most programming languages, with the exception of developers using C#, C, Go, and Rust, which had more edits among men.