Competence-Confidence Gap: A Threat to Female Developers' Contribution on GitHub

On GitHub, contributing to a new project is crucial for a developer to gain personal growth and maximize impact in the community. It is known that female developers are often hesitant to explore the opportunities to contribute to new projects even when they possess the competence to make valuable contributions. Drawing from the literature of the competence-confidence gap, we develop a fresh explanation for this phenomenon. We validate the theoretical explanation through an empirical study using GitHub's historical data. In this study, we identify all female developers ranking in top 5,000 GitHub users. Using the Granger Causality Test, we find that, for the majority of identified female developers, initiating a pull request to a new repository is "Granger" caused by the quick increase of followers in the preceding couple of weeks. For most male developers, our observations show that their new pull requests have no relationship with the dynamics of follower numbers. The results indicate that the competence-confidence gap is a threat to female developers' contribution on GitHub. The research suggests that helping female developers to overcome the competence-confidence gap is critical for encouraging female's contribution open source development, as well as growing their reputations and impacts in the community.