Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study
Channel: British Computer Society Open Source Specialists
Date: 2020-04-04

Presented by Dr Andrea Capiluppi

Online communities are flourishing as social meeting web spaces for users and peer community members.

Different online communities require different levels of competence for participants to join, and scattered evidence suggests that females and minorities as participants can be underrepresented. Additional anecdotal evidence suggests that women withdraw from unfriendly online communities.

Owing to the limited amount of empirical evidence on the matter, this talk presents a quantitative study of the phenomenon, in order to assess the representation and social impact of gender in online communities. This study positions itself within recent and focused international initiatives, launched by the European Commission in order to encourage women in the field of science and technology.

Focusing on technical support networks around web content management tools (e.g. Drupal and WordPress) and on questions & answers websites (e.g. StackOverflow), this paper unearths a spectrum of online communities, in which women participate to various degrees.

Research highlights:

  - Anecdotal evidence suggests that sexism or the wrong incentives pervade specific online communities
  - We studied three online communities: StackOverflow, Drupal and WordPress
  - We compared levels of participation and engagement of women and men
  - We found ‘women-friendly’ communities, where gender representation is unequal, but engagement is similar across gender
  - We also found ‘women-unfriendly’communities, where gender representation is also unequal, and women engage less than men

About the speaker:

Dr Andrea Capiluppi joined the Department of Computer Science at Brunel University London (UK), as a Lecturer in Software Development in May 2012. Between 2009 and 2012 he was at University of East London, working as a Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering. Before that, he worked as a Senior Lecturer and at University of Lincoln, between 2006 and 2009.

Andrea’s research and teaching interests focus on Software Evolution and Maintenance, as well as the construction, evaluation and maintenance of Social Networks. Andrea is mostly interested in the use of open technologies and in understanding how they can improve learning and teaching as well as the production of software and other artefacts.