Introduction
Women face unique challenges when trying to onboard OSS projects, such as having their skills undervalued and lacking gender-sensitive support. Experienced contributors can play a crucial role as mentors, guiding newcomers through the onboarding process and fostering inclusive environments. These supportive spaces not only help women navigate OSS communities but also encourage their long-term engagement and involvement. This section explores how OSS communities can effectively prepare mentors to address the needs and barriers faced by women, promoting their active participation and retention in the OSS ecosystem.
What is Being a Mentor in the Context of OSS Development?
OSS communities thrive on the contributions of developers from all corners of the world. Unlike private companies, many contributions to OSS projects come from volunteers rather than employees. Anyone can contribute to an open-source project. The major challenge in this ecosystem is to support newcomers who wish to join. For instance, if a developer decides to contribute a bug fix to the Python programming language, they may encounter various hurdles, such as challenges in setting up the project on their local machine, reaching out to members of the Python community, or submitting their code to the official Python repository. These obstacles can make it difficult for new contributors to get involved and make meaningful contributions to the project.
To help newcomers navigate these challenges, projects often assign mentors to guide and support their work. Mentorship programs serve as a key strategy for retaining newcomers in OSS projects, though their implementation varies across projects. In this context, a mentor functions similarly to a professor in a classroom — answering questions, overseeing contributions, and explaining the project’s inner activities. As stated by Steinmacher et al. in their research paper, “Being a mentor in open source projects” ↗,
Mentors are usually peers who succeeded in overcoming the project challenges themselves and are willing to help others onboard. In this context, a mentor is a peer who was assigned to or who volunteered to support newcomers onboarding to a project. – Steinmacher et al.
Mentorship programs are essential for the retention of newcomers. The problem, however, is that most mentors are not prepared to support women with the particular challenges they might face due to gender-related issues. Even though an answer to this problem is yet to be given, recent studies summarized guidelines on how to better prepare mentors to support women’s participation in OSS. Here is what we have so far:
Expected Attributes of a Mentor
Most mentors are not adequately prepared to support women in overcoming gender-related challenges. While a clear set of attributes is yet to be defined, recent studies have outlined discussions on how mentors and software maintainers may prepare themselves to foster women’s participation in OSS. Here’s what we’ve learned so far:
Awareness of Barriers Faced by Newcomers
A mentor’s goal is to help mentees develop their skills through guidance and expertise. Beyond technical support, mentors must also be aware of other challenges that newcomers may face, especially when adapting to a project. Challenges such as fear of judgment, performance anxiety, and imposter syndrome are common among individuals attempting to join an OSS project. These challenges affect individuals of all backgrounds, including but not limited to women. An effective mentor recognizes these obstacles and tailors their guidance accordingly to foster a supportive and inclusive environment.
Recreated from Trinkenreich, B. (2022). Understanding and supporting women’s participation in open-source software, Figure 3.8.
The research paper “Newcomers’ barriers… is that all? An analysis of mentors’ and newcomers’ barriers in OSS projects” ↗ talks about the barriers that newcomers face when joining OSS and how mentors help in facilitating the onboarding process for newcomers.
Acknowledging Gender Inequalities
Mentors should stay vigilant about toxic behaviors among their peers and take proactive steps to prevent and address disrespectful conduct. Mentors must also be aware of personal challenges women may face due to gender inequality, such as imposter syndrome and work-life balance issues. Examples of challenges faced by women within OSS communities include:
“In technical discussions, people feel that women cannot do it better so they make comments which makes you uncomfortable.” (Trinkenreich al., 2022)
“When women try to achieve more things they are called ambitious in a negative way. Whereas men are expected to.” (Trinkenreich al., 2022)
These responses are a few of the challenges reported by women in “An empirical investigation on the challenges faced by women in the software industry: A case study.” ↗. The women in the survey who also reported experiencing these challenges have cited them as reasons for leaving the software industry. It is important for mentors to understand the challenges that are present so that they can better support women in OSS.
Regular Check-Ins and Responsiveness
Dedicating time and effort to communicating with mentees helps strengthen and grow an OSS community in the long run. Mentors can set specific times for responding to mentees’ requests and establish clear communication guidelines — whether through discussion forums, email, or apps like Slack.
Common Challenges for Mentors and How to Avoid Them
Task Selection for Newcomers
One challenge mentors face is selecting tasks appropriate for the skill level of mentees. A useful strategy in OSS projects is “tagging” tasks to identify their difficulty level. Tagging can also include listing the exact skills and knowledge needed to complete a given task. This helps mentors assign appropriate tasks and guide mentees effectively.
Providing an Inclusive Environment
Research indicates that “Inclusion is important for attracting newcomers, as well as retaining them and increasing their productivity” (Steinmacher et al., 2021) Using inclusive language and actively countering stereotypes can encourage more women to engage and persist in OSS. One other tip for maintaining an inclusive environment is keeping your code of conduct up-to-date. This can also attract individuals with similar values to your project, and help later down the line when facing behavioral difficulties with newcomers or lack of progress.
Keeping Newcomers Engaged
Mentors struggle to keep newcomers engaged. As one mentor put it “People come, they fix their bug, and they go away” (Steinmacher et al.).
Breaking tasks into smaller, manageable pieces and allowing newcomers to suggest functionalities can help retain engagement. Additionally, ensuring timely feedback from mentors can significantly improve newcomer retention.
Balancing Many Responsibilities as a Mentor
Handling both mentoring and project contributions can be overwhelming. It is important to maintain balance by limiting the number of mentees taken on at once, ensuring that each mentee receives proper attention.
Harsh Project Environment
A demanding OSS environment can be discouraging for newcomers, especially when they receive harsh criticism. Possible solutions include:
- Tagging newcomers so they are treated with more patience and support.
- Holding mentorship workshops to help them onboard smoothly.
Research suggests that women drop out of OSS “due to the unappealing and hostile social dynamics especially in medium-size projects” (Trinkenreich al., 2022). Creating a less harsh environment can help retain women in OSS communities.
Conclusion
Dedicating time and resources to strong mentorship programs for women will support their careers in OSS while also increasing diversity within projects. Mentorship is one of the key processes for onboarding newcomers into a project, and it is essential for retaining women and overcoming initial barriers. Providing social support through mentorship helps women find a sense of belonging in OSS, making it an appealing and worthwhile investment.
