How Remote Work Can Foster a More Inclusive Environment for Transgender Developers

In this position paper, we claim that remote work offers a mechanism of control for identity disclosure and empowerment of software developers from marginalized communities. By talking to several transgender software developers we identified three themes that resonate across the trans experience and intersect with the advantages to working in software development remotely: identity disclosure, high-impact technical work and the autonomy to disengage and re-engage. Based on these themes we identify several open questions that the research community should address.

[1]  Gemma Catolino,et al.  Gender Diversity and Women in Software Teams: How Do They Affect Community Smells? , 2019, 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS).

[2]  Alexander Serebrenik,et al.  A Data Set for Social Diversity Studies of GitHub Teams , 2015, 2015 IEEE/ACM 12th Working Conference on Mining Software Repositories.

[3]  Alexander Serebrenik,et al.  Going Farther Together: The Impact of Social Capital on Sustained Participation in Open Source , 2019, 2019 IEEE/ACM 41st International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[4]  Thompson S. H. Teo,et al.  Factorial dimensions and differential effects of gender on perceptions of teleworking , 1998 .

[5]  Premkumar T. Devanbu,et al.  Gender and Tenure Diversity in GitHub Teams , 2015, CHI.

[6]  E. Meerwijk,et al.  Transgender Population Size in the United States: a Meta-Regression of Population-Based Probability Samples. , 2017, American journal of public health.

[7]  Leif Singer,et al.  How Social and Communication Channels Shape and Challenge a Participatory Culture in Software Development , 2017, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.

[8]  Kyungsub Steve Choi A comparative analysis of different gender pair combinations in pair programming , 2015, Behav. Inf. Technol..

[9]  Judith S. Olson,et al.  Distance Matters , 2000, Hum. Comput. Interact..

[10]  U. Huws,et al.  Teleworking and gender , 1996 .

[11]  Morgan Klaus Scheuerman,et al.  Safe Spaces and Safe Places , 2018, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[12]  E. Riley,et al.  Counseling Support for the Forgotten Transgender Community , 2011 .

[13]  W. Keith Edwards,et al.  Intersectional HCI: Engaging Identity through Gender, Race, and Class , 2017, CHI.

[14]  Leanna Lucero,et al.  Safe spaces in online places: social media and LGBTQ youth , 2017 .

[15]  Oliver L. Haimson Social Media as Social Transition Machinery , 2018, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[16]  Andrew D. Brown Identities and Identity Work in Organizations , 2015 .

[17]  Diane-Gabrielle Tremblay,et al.  Balancing work and family with telework? Organizational issues and challenges for women and managers , 2002 .

[18]  S. Stryker,et al.  Transgender History, Homonormativity, and Disciplinarity , 2008 .

[19]  Margaret M. Burnett,et al.  Open Source Barriers to Entry, Revisited: A Sociotechnical Perspective , 2018, 2018 IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[20]  Susan R Rankin,et al.  The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey , 2016 .

[21]  James D. Herbsleb,et al.  From Diversity by Numbers to Diversity as Process: Supporting Inclusiveness in Software Development Teams with Brainstorming , 2017, 2017 IEEE/ACM 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE).

[22]  Philip J. Guo,et al.  Paradise unplugged: identifying barriers for female participation on stack overflow , 2016, SIGSOFT FSE.

[23]  Margaret M. Burnett,et al.  GenderMag: A Method for Evaluating Software's Gender Inclusiveness , 2016, Interact. Comput..

[24]  Alexander Serebrenik,et al.  Gender, Representation and Online Participation: A Quantitative Study of StackOverflow , 2012, 2012 International Conference on Social Informatics.

[25]  R. Stuart Geiger Summary Analysis of the 2017 GitHub Open Source Survey , 2017, ArXiv.

[26]  Emerson Murphy-Hill,et al.  Gender differences and bias in open source: pull request acceptance of women versus men , 2017, PeerJ Comput. Sci..

[27]  Suzan Lewis,et al.  Home-based Telework, Gender, and the Synchronization of Work and Family: Perspectives of Teleworkers and their Co-residents , 2001 .

[28]  Anita Greenhill,et al.  Gender and teleworking identities in the risk society: A research agenda , 2004 .