Is open source open to women?

Open source software powers most of the internet, but who actually builds it? Breanden Beneschott at Toptal scraped 20,000 GitHub profiles to find out, using Genderize.io to classify each developer by gender. The answer was blunt: open source is overwhelmingly male, and the further in you go, the fewer women you find.

The methodology

Beneschott initially scraped 5,000 GitHub profiles and ran them through Genderize.io. So few came back as female that the sample was too small for meaningful analysis. He scraped another 15,000 profiles, bringing the total to 20,000. Of those, Genderize.io could confidently classify 15,374 — about three-quarters — with the remainder having names too ambiguous or unusual to call.

The numbers

Of the 15,374 classifiable profiles, just 926 — 6.0% — were women.

That figure got worse at higher engagement levels. Among users with more than 10 contributions, only 5.4% were female. As engagement intensified — more contributions, more followers, more repositories — the percentage of women declined further. The open source community didn't just have a recruitment problem; it had a retention problem.

Why so few

The article surfaced several explanations from women in the community. Some reported avoiding public repositories to dodge the scrutiny of being the only woman on a project. Others adopted gender-neutral or male usernames so that contributors would evaluate their code rather than their identity. One hypothesis suggested that talented female engineers simply didn't view open source contribution as necessary for career advancement in the way their male peers did.

These weren't abstract theories. They pointed to a feedback loop: a male-dominated community makes participation less appealing for women, which keeps the community male-dominated.

The impact

The piece was published on Toptal's engineering blog, reaching a large developer audience. The 6% figure and the declining-with-engagement pattern became a commonly cited data point in discussions about diversity in open source — a concrete benchmark for a problem the industry had mostly discussed in generalities.