Gender imbalance in information technology in general, and Free/Open Source Software specifically, is a well-known problem in the field. Still, little is known yet about the large-scale extent and long-term trends that underpin the phenomenon. We contribute to fill this gap by conducting a longitudinal study of the population of contributors to publicly available software source code. We analyze 1.6 billion commits corresponding to the development history of 120 million projects, contributed by 33 million distinct authors over a period of 50 years. We classify author names by gender and study their evolution over time.We show that, while the amount of commits by female authors remains low overall, there is evidence of a stable long-term increase in their proportion over all contributions, providing hope of a more gender-balanced future for collaborative software development.

中文翻译：

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公共法规贡献中的性别差异：50 年的视角

一般而言，信息技术中的性别不平衡，特别是自由/开源软件，是该领域的一个众所周知的问题。尽管如此，人们对支撑这一现象的大规模范围和长期趋势知之甚少。我们通过对公开可用软件源代码的贡献者群体进行纵向研究来填补这一空白。我们分析了 16 亿次提交，对应于 1.2 亿个项目的发展历史，由 3300 万不同的作者在 50 年的时间里贡献。我们按性别对作者姓名进行分类并研究它们随时间的演变。我们表明，虽然女性作者的提交量总体上仍然较低，但有证据表明她们在所有贡献中的比例长期稳定增长，