Gender, representation and online participation: A quantitative study of StackOverflow

Abstract

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 women can be overly under-represented. Moreover, anecdotal evidence of the Q&, A website Stack Overflow suggests that women withdraw from unfriendly online communities. Due to the lack of empirical evidence on the matter, this paper provides a quantitative study of the phenomenon, in order to assess the representation and social impact of gender in Stack Overflow. This study positions itself within recent and focused international initiatives, launched by the European Commission in order to encourage women in the field of sciences and technology. Our findings confirm that men represent the vast majority of contributors to Stack Overflow. Moreover, men participate more, earn more reputation, and engage in the 'game' more than women do. © 2012 IEEE.