Reinforcing Diversity Company Policies: Insights from StackOverflow Developers Survey

Diversity is being intensively discussed by different knowledge areas of society and discussions in Software Engineering, are increasing as well. There are unconscious bias and lack of representativeness and when we talk about characteristics as ethnicity and gender, to mention a few. How can tech companies support diversity, minimizing unconscious bias in their teams? Studies say that diversity builds better teams and delivers better results, among other benefits. Cognitive diversity is linked to better outcomes, and is influenced by identity diversity (e.g., gender, race, etc.), mainly when tasks are related to problem-solving and prediction. In this work, we are interested in understanding the pain points in software engineering regarding diversity and provide insights to support the attraction, hiring and retention policies for more diverse software engineering environments. StackOverflow is a popular community question&answer forum, with a high engagement of software developers. Yearly, they apply a survey, present straightforward results, and made the anonymized results available for download. So, it is possible to perform additional analysis beyond the original ones. Using data visualization techniques, we analyzed 2018 data implying insights and recommendations. Results show that diversity in companies is not yet a conscious decision-making factor for developers assessing a new job opportunity, and respondents from underrepresented groups tend to believe more they are not as good as their peers. We also propose a discussion about the unconscious bias, stereotypes, and impostor syndrome and how to provide support on that.

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