  The gender gap is a significant concern facing the software industry as the
development becomes more geographically distributed. Widely shared reports
indicate that gender differences may be specific to each region. However, how
complete can these reports be with little to no research reflective of the Open
Source Software (OSS) process and communities software is now commonly
developed in? Our study presents a multi-region geographical analysis of gender
inclusion on GitHub. This mixed-methods approach includes quantitatively
investigating differences in gender inclusion in projects across geographic
regions and investigate these trends over time using data from contributions to
21,456 project repositories. We also qualitatively understand the unique
experiences of developers contributing to these projects through a survey that
is strategically targeted to developers in various regions worldwide. Our
findings indicate that gender diversity is low across all parts of the world,
with no substantial difference across regions. However, there has been
statistically significant improvement in diversity worldwide since 2014, with
certain regions such as Africa improving at faster pace. We also find that most
motivations and barriers to contributions (e.g., lack of resources to
contribute and poor working environment) were shared across regions, however,
some insightful differences, such as how to make projects more inclusive, did
arise. From these findings, we derive and present implications for tools that
can foster inclusion in open source software communities and empower
contributions from everyone, everywhere.
