Topic "Gender"

Gender (= Sexual identity, especially in relation to society or culture.) is a difficult topic when studying social systems and there is no way to deny that the Open Source movement seems to have a clear gender problem. Naming a single female community leader of an open source project is already an almost impossible endevaour, yet academic discussion of this problem seems to be a rare thing. With this topic we want to look into social sciences and research on technology and gender to inspect which reasons prevent women from having a larger influence in "open" communities.

To illustrate the point have a look at the results from "Free/Libre and Open Source Software: Survey and Study" concerning gender: Only 1.1% or 25 of 2225 participants in the study were female.

This topic is little researched and I am not sure that we can find a research paper on the issue that combines OSS and gender. Students who pick up this topic might be able to publish a paper as part of the next ICSE workshop on Open Source. This would require extra work of course (in conducting a survey or gathering qualitative results).

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Contact

E-Mail: gensel@inf.fu-berlin.de