Diversity, including gender diversity, is valued by many software development organizations, yet the field remains dominated by men. One reason for this lack of diversity is gender bias. In this paper, we study the effects of that bias by using an existing framework derived from the gender studies literature.We adapt the four main effects proposed in the framework by posing hypotheses about how they might manifest on GitHub,then evaluate those hypotheses quantitatively. While our results how that effects of gender bias are largely invisible on the GitHub platform itself, there are still signals of women concentrating their work in fewer places and being more restrained in communication than men.

Open source software communities are increasingly aware of how social biases and discrimination negatively affect their culture. Many choose to establish policies regulating their contributors' social interactions without considering the efficacy of such measures. If these communities lack an empirical awareness of their policies' impact, they may find themselves adopting dogmatic practices that serve only to increase overhead maintenance costs. Conducting a gender diversity analysis of popular open source projects, I discovered no significant change in the proportion of women contributing to projects with or without a code of conduct. In light of this discovery, the open source community should consider supplemental strategies in order to foster diverse participation in their projects.