Someone Like Me: How Does Peer Parity Influence Participation of Women on Stack Overflow?

In proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) |

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Stack Overflow is a learning community for software developers to share and solve programming problems with each other. However, women are often deterred from contributing questions or answers. Research external to programming communities suggest the presence of peers can increase activity from underrepresented users in unfamiliar spaces. To investigate the concept of peer parity, we studied how women participate on Stack Overflow and if the presence of more women on a thread enhanced their activity. We found that women who encountered other women were more likely to engage sooner than those who did not. We discuss how these findings can support women in programming communities through peer mentorship and increase engagement.

GitHub OCTO Inaugural Speaker: Golden Rules of Building Online Communities that Matter by Dr. Denae Ford Robinson

Dr. Denae Ford Robinson gives the inaugural lecture at the GitHub OCTO (Office of the CTO) Speaker Series. Golden Rules of Building Online Communities that Matter Online communities for programmers, like Stack Overflow and GitHub, have norms that are not obvious nor inclusive to the 50 million programmers visiting monthly. For example, many novices ask questions that go unanswered or downvoted for not conforming to unwritten community norms. In addition, the most popular online programming communities have reported having below 7% participation from marginalized developers such as women and non-binary people. But how do these norms and demographics shift for developers across the globe? Are their differences in which projects developers decide to contribute to? In this talk, I will 1) offer a perspective of…