Characterizating the Participation of the LGBTQIA+ Community on GitHub
Erick Paiva, Guilherme Carvalho, João Pedro Mayrink, Maria Clara Maruch, Pedro Felix, Gabriel Pacheco, Laerte Xavier · Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development · 2025
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.