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.