Researchers at the University of Bologna and the Polytechnic Institute of Paris have curated a dataset tracking women’s contributions to publicly available software projects. The dataset consists of over 33 million authors who wrote 1.7 billion commits, or code changes, from 1970 to 2020. The team determined the gender for 21.4 million authors and found that only 1.6 millions authors were women. According to the dataset, the ratio of women authorship decreased from 2019 to 2020, suggesting that the COVID-19 pandemic affected women’s ability to participate in public code projects more than men.
Image credit: Flickr user Christiaan Colen
