Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams

TLDR

Open‑source software development is a collaborative, geographically distributed practice that can accommodate diverse teams, and while diversity is known to improve output in offline groups, its impact on OSS teams remains unclear. We analyzed GitHub’s extensive OSS project data to examine how gender and tenure diversity affect team productivity and turnover. Regression analysis of GitHub data and survey results revealed that gender and tenure diversity are significant, positive predictors of productivity, explaining a substantial portion of variability and offering actionable insights for recruitment and performance decisions.

Abstract

Software development is usually a collaborative venture. Open Source Software (OSS) projects are no exception; indeed, by design, the OSS approach can accommodate teams that are more open, geographically distributed, and dynamic than commercial teams. This, we find, leads to OSS teams that are quite diverse. Team diversity, predominantly in offline groups, is known to correlate with team output, mostly with positive effects. How about in OSS? Using GitHub, the largest publicly available collection of OSS projects, we studied how gender and tenure diversity relate to team productivity and turnover. Using regression modeling of GitHub data and the results of a survey, we show that both gender and tenure diversity are positive and significant predictors of productivity, together explaining a sizable fraction of the data variability. These results can inform decision making on all levels, leading to better outcomes in recruiting and performance.