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1. An empirical investigation on the challenges faced by women in the software industry: a case study

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3510458.3513018  

   Trinkenreich, Bianca; Britto, Ricardo; Gerosa, Marco A.; Steinmacher, Igor (May 2022, ACM/IEEE 44rd International Conference on Software Engineering, SEIS - Software Engineering in Society (ICSE SEIS 2022))

   Context: Addressing women’s under-representation in the software industry, a widely recognized concern, requires attracting as well as retaining more women. Hearing from women practitioners, particularly those positioned in multi-cultural settings, about their challenges and adopting their lived experienced solutions can support the design of programs to resolve the under-representation issue. Goal: We investigated the challenges women face in global software development teams, particularly what motivates women to leave their company; how those challenges might break down according to demographics; and strategies to mitigate the identified challenges. Method: To achieve this goal, we conducted an exploratory case study in Ericsson, a global technology company. We surveyed 94 women and employed mixed-methods to analyze the data. Results: Our findings reveal that women face socio-cultural challenges, including work-life balance issues, benevolent and hostile sexism, lack of recognition and peer parity, impostor syndrome, glass ceiling bias effects, the prove-it-again phenomenon, and the maternal wall. The participants of our research provided different suggestions to address/mitigate the reported challenges, including sabbatical policies, flexibility of location and time, parenthood support, soft skills training for managers, equality of payment and opportunities between genders, mentoring and role models to support career growth, directives to hire more women, inclusive groups and events, women’s empowerment, and recognition for women’s success. The framework of challenges and suggestions can inspire further initiatives both in academia and industry to onboard and retain women. 

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2. Electricity access empowers women through expansion of economic, physical, and mental spaces in Zambia

   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2024.103687  

   Kannan, Sudha; Bessette, Douglas; Makai, Likonge (October 2024, Energy Research & Social Science)

   Expanding electricity access (Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 7) and empowering women (SDG 5) are closely linked. Most studies quantifying the benefits of the former for women focus on their economic empowerment; however, if and how such access results in women's empowerment is best understood by examining the cultural context, norms, and gender roles in which that access occurs. For instance, time saved from the use of electric appliances may be used for productive engagements, but if gender roles restrict women from leaving the home or engaging in paid work, such benefits are not realized. Here, we delve deeper into the multi-faceted and context-specific concept of women's empowerment via 28 semi-structured interviews with Zambian women. We include households with and without electricity to understand women's subjective meaning of empowerment and how access to electricity may (dis) empower them. We analyze their responses using Deshmukh-Ranadive's (2005) Spaces approach to empowerment which categorizes an individual's spaces into physical, economic, political, socio-cultural, and mental space. We find that electricity access empowers women by expanding their economic and physical, along with mental, space. This occurs via paid opportunities outside the home using electrical appliances and women reporting greater economic independence, camaraderie, self-reliance, and agency as a result. Additionally, by asking women to define what empowerment means to them, we not only bolster the claim that electricity access empowers women both economically and socially, but also ensure future programs account for empowerment explicitly in their plans. 

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3. Being Asian American Women Scientists and Engineers in the United States: Intersection of Ethnicity and Gender

   https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642221078510  

   Varma, Roli (March 2022, American Behavioral Scientist)

   A high level of educational and occupational achievements in science and engineering (S&E) in the US has changed the image of Asian Americans from the “yellow peril” to a “model minority.” Behind this new identity is the belief that Asian Americans as a group have equaled, if not surpassed, the standards of success set by White America in S&E. It is further assumed that Asian American women are advancing equally in S&E. The reality is that they are over-represented as Asian Americans but under-represented as women in S&E occupations. They experience challenges associated with both, their ethnicity and gender. They face “double bind”—a term used for women of color who simultaneously experience sexism and racism in S&E. This paper presents Asian American women’s unique situations within S&E organizations, with a particular focus on high-technology industry, where most of them are employed. It focuses on their identities and socio-cultural categorizations. 

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4. Shodagor women cooperate across domains of work and childcare to solve an adaptive problem

   https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0433  

   Starkweather, K. E.; Reynolds, A. Z.; Zohora, F.; Alam, N. (January 2023, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)

   Across human societies, women's economic production and their contributions to childcare are critical in supporting reproductive fitness for themselves, their spouses and children. Yet, the necessity of performing both work and childcare tasks presents women with an adaptive problem in which they must determine how best to allocate their time and energy between these tasks. Women often use cooperative relationships with alloparents to solve this problem, but whether or not women cooperate across different domains (e.g. work and childcare) to access alloparents remains relatively under-explored. Using social network data collected with Shodagor households in Bangladesh, we show that women who need childcare help in order to work draw on cooperative work partners as potential alloparents, and that all women rely heavily on kin, but not reciprocal cooperation for childcare help. These results indicate that Shodagor women strategize to create work and childcare relationships in ways that help solve the adaptive problem they face. We discuss the implications of our results and the example provided by Shodagor women for a broader understanding of women's cooperative relationships, including the importance of socio-ecological circumstances and gendered divisions of labour in shaping women's cooperative strategies.This article is part of the theme issue ‘Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives’. 

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5. The Diversity-Hire Narrative in CS: Sources, Impacts, and Responses

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3626252.3630945  

   Perdriau, Christopher; Ojha, Vidushi; Gray, Kaitlynn; Lagesse, Brent; Lewis, Colleen M. (March 2024, ACM)

   Background : Affirmative action programs (AAPs) aim to increase the representation of people from historically underrepresented groups (HUGs) in the workforce, but can unintentionally signal that a person from a HUG was selected for their identity rather than their merit. We call this signal the diversity-hire narrative. Prior work has found that women hear the diversity-hire narrative during their computer science (CS) internships, but women and non-binary students' experiences surrounding the narrative are important to understand and have not been thoroughly explored. Objectives: We seek to understand the (1) sources and (2) impacts of this narrative, as well as (3) how students respond to it. Methods: We conducted and qualitatively analyzed 23 semi-structured interviews with undergraduate CS students in the gender minority (i.e., students who identify as women or non-binary). Results : Participants reported hearing the diversity-hire narrative from family and peers. They reported feeling self-doubt and a double standard where their success was not attributed to their intelligence, but their peers' success was. Participants responded to the diversity-hire narrative by (1) ignoring it, (2) attempting to prove themselves, (3) stating that their peers are jealous, (4) explaining that AAPs address inequity, and (5) explaining that everyone is held to a high standard. Implications: These results expand our understanding of the experiences that likely impact undergraduate CS students in the gender minority. This is important for broadening participation in computing because results indicate that students in the gender minority often encounter the diversity-hire narrative, which deprives them of recognition by invalidating their hard work. 

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