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Gender Equality in Software Engineering Education – A Study of Female Participation in Customer-Driven Projects

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Sustainability in Software Engineering and Business Information Management (SSEBIM 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation ((LNISO,volume 62))

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Abstract

Gender equality, as a part of SDGs, is gaining research attention due to the desire to promote female participation in the engineering sector. The objective of this work is to enhance the understanding of female students’ participation in software engineering projects to support gender-aware course optimization. Since 2015, we have investigated the activity profiles of female students in terms of software engineering activities in a fourth-year software project course. Empirical evidence has been collected through surveys, structured interviews and project reports from 39 projects. We found that the active activity areas of female students are project management and requirement engineering, while the areas lacking active involvement are architecture and Scrum methodology. While the findings differ from those of some previous studies, they suggest which course and project settings will facilitate the active participation of females in such project courses.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://eugain.eu/.

  2. 2.

    https://www.ntnu.edu/idun.

  3. 3.

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1fkxI4xT5msWf_J6k5ibsOKJNlAJ-Rj3slOIVw8zwJVs.

  4. 4.

    https://tinyurl.com/tdt4290surveyresponses.

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Acknowledgement

This work has been partially supported by the EUGAIN COST Action CA19122 - European Network for Gender Balance in Informatics and by the NFR 295920 IDUN project.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of South Eastern Norway, Bø i Telemark, Norway

    Anh Nguyen-Duc

  2. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Letizia Jaccheri

Authors
  1. Anh Nguyen-Duc
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  2. Letizia Jaccheri
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anh Nguyen-Duc .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Multidisciplinary Research Centre for Innovations in SMEs (MrciS) and Department of Digital Innovations, GISMA University of Applied Sciences, Potsdam, Germany

    Varun Gupta

  2. Faculty of Economics, Business and Tourism, University of Alcala, Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, Spain

    Luis Rubalcaba

  3. Computer Science & Engineering, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India

    Chetna Gupta

  4. Institute for Information Systems, University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, Olten, Solothurn, Switzerland

    Thomas Hanne

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Nguyen-Duc, A., Jaccheri, L. (2023). Gender Equality in Software Engineering Education – A Study of Female Participation in Customer-Driven Projects. In: Gupta, V., Rubalcaba, L., Gupta, C., Hanne, T. (eds) Sustainability in Software Engineering and Business Information Management. SSEBIM 2022. Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organisation, vol 62. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-32436-9_4

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