  Open Source Software (OSS) projects are typically the result of collective
efforts performed by developers with different backgrounds. Although the
quality of developers' contributions should be the only factor influencing the
evaluation of the contributions to OSS projects, recent studies have shown that
diversity issues are correlated with the acceptance or rejection of developers'
contributions. This paper assists this emerging state-of-the-art body on
diversity research with the first empirical study that analyzes how developers'
perceptible race and ethnicity relates to the evaluation of the contributions
in OSS. We performed a large-scale quantitative study of OSS projects in
GitHub. We extracted the developers' perceptible race and ethnicity from their
names in GitHub using the Name-Prism tool and applied regression modeling of
contributions (i.e, pull requests) data from GHTorrent and GitHub. We observed
that among the developers whose perceptible race and ethnicity was captured by
the tool, only 16.56% were perceptible as Non-White developers; contributions
from perceptible White developers have about 6-10% higher odds of being
accepted when compared to contributions from perceptible Non-White developers;
and submitters with perceptible non-white races and ethnicities are more likely
to get their pull requests accepted when the integrator is estimated to be from
their same race and ethnicity rather than when the integrator is estimated to
be White. Our initial analysis shows a low number of Non-White developers
participating in OSS. Furthermore, the results from our regression analysis
lead us to believe that there may exist differences between the evaluation of
the contributions from different perceptible races and ethnicities. Thus, our
findings reinforce the need for further studies on racial and ethnic diversity
in software engineering to foster healthier OSS communities.
