How to Ask About Gender Identity of Software Engineers and "Guess" It from the Archival Data

Multiple studies of gender in software engineering require identifying gender of the individuals involved either by asking them (when conducting interviews and surveys) or by “guessing” it from archival data recorded in software repositories. In this chapter we discuss ways to ask about gender in surveys and interviews as well as three groups of automated genderization approaches proposed in the literature: name-to-gender, face-to-gender, and artifact-to-gender. For each one of the approaches, we discuss the way they work, the associated ethical concerns, the reliability and accuracy concerns, and the assumptions they make.