ABSTRACT | While women have been shown to make vital contributions to the collective intelligence of teams (Wooley-Williams et al., 2010), they are also marginalized in many respects (Gill, 2002; Terrell et al., 2016). In project-based creative fields, investing in social capital by sharing knowledge with other experts is an important aspect of a successful career, and men seem to do a better job at it (Lutter, 2015). The field of software development is an area with especially strong male dominance. In this article, we analyzed the paths to success for men and women based on activity traces on GitHub with data on more than ten million users, active in more than ten million repositories. After inferring users’ gender, we analyzed the careers of the most active ten thousand women, men, and users of unidentified gender. We found that women can succeed to the extent they adopt a collaboration and activity pattern characteristic of men.
BIO | Orsi spent 6 years as a data analyst at various startups, taking part in network science, data mining and NLP projects. Her main interest is to transfer academic findings into everyday business solutions. Besides, she writes articles about startups, data analytics and traveling. She is an active member and ambassador of the Bridge Budapest Association, organizer of Django Girls Budapest and mentor at the KONNEKT Organization. In her free time, Orsi loves hiking, paragliding and exploring new countries.