Mentorship of Women in OSS Projects: A Cross-Disciplinary, Integrative Review

Mentorship is a relationship in which a more experienced or more knowledgeable person (a mentor) helps guide a less experienced or less knowledgeable person (a mentee); here we draw upon mentor role theory, which holds that mentorship often acts as a vehicle for both career development and psychosocial support, with the end goal of cultivating the mentee’s whole self [14]. While mentorship can benefit everyone, studies have shown that positive mentorship experiences are especially significant for members of underrepresented groups. A 2019 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) found that mentorship can be a powerful tool for cultivating professionals from underrepresented groups in STEMM fields [7]; through a close working alliance with a mentor, women and minority mentees can acquire not just the skills they need to succeed but also an affirmation of belonging and professional identity that is so crucial to retention.Footnote1

In this chapter, we examine the practice of mentorship as a strategy for the retention of women in OSS contexts. Scholarship in recent years has drawn attention to the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion in growing and sustaining open source software (OSS) communities [SE6]. Along gender lines, women developers are underrepresented in OSS projects and have a higher disengagement rate than men [17]. Studies suggest that a mix of factors such as gender bias [SE15] and a lack of confidence [SE30] affect rates of early disengagement; as Singh and Bongiovanni put it, women in OSS must engage in “vexatious labor” to prove their worth and maintain their place in the community [18]. One interpretation of the data is that women contributors to OSS seek a “sense of belonging” that is held at risk by barriers to inclusion [13, 19, 22].

While mentorship has been shown to be an effective mechanism for onboarding support in OSS development [3, 9, 11, 21], the connection between mentorship practices and diversity and inclusion (D&I) has been understudied in software engineering. Numerous studies outside of software engineering, however, have linked mentorship with diversity and inclusion [5, 6, 7, 8, 10, 24]. Here we see an opportunity to leverage insights from the broader literature on mentorship to help frame the challenges faced by women contributors to OSS and how inclusive mentorship practices may help address those challenges.

To that end, we present findings from a cross-disciplinary review of mentorship among women professionals in OSS contexts. Following the guidelines by Petersen et al. [16], we investigated the challenges women protégées face in OSS and possible strategies that may help overcome those challenges. To further enrich our understanding of these barriers and strategies, we conducted a second mapping study on the challenges faced by women in mentorship in the broader literature outside software engineering. This approach enables us (1) to situate OSS mentorship in the broader context, (2) to compare and contrast the experiences of women professionals across disciplines, and (3) to surface additional strategies for ensuring the retention of women in OSS through mentorship.