The effects of team gender composition in capstone software development projects

Women are greatly underrepresented in software engineering programs. Thus, few women enter the software development industry, and even fewer stay for a long time. The roles assumed by most of those that do stay evolve over time, becoming more managerial and less technical. Some companies prefer not to hire women, since some stereotypes suggest that they may be less productive, more troublesome or that they may eventually drop out due to personal issues. In this paper, we aim to prove that women are at least as productive as men when addressing technical work. Moreover, we also intend to show that including more women in development teams positively impacts workplace climate. To address this issue we conducted a case study where we analyzed the impact of counting on different number of women in 53 development teams in a software engineering capstone course over 5 years. University capstone courses are final courses that resemble industrial work. We found that both women and men perform similarly, but teams that have women have less outliers. These results suggest that it may be convenient to include women as part of software development teams whenever possible. We hypothesize that frequent women dropout may be in part due to the lack of recognition of the benefits of including them in software development teams.