Workplace Discrimination in Software Engineering: Where We Stand Today

Context: Discrimination within the workplace negatively impacts employees across the board and has been studied in various fields, such as wage-earning workplaces, healthcare, and social media. However, considerable work is still needed to gain a deeper understanding of workplace discrimination in Software Engineering. Objective: The research objective is to gain deeper insights into the causes, forms, and effects of workplace discrimination toward software professionals, thus providing insights to reduce workplace discrimination. Method: We applied an empirical investigation to reach our goal. We collected 97 complete responses from our online survey, including a set of open-ended, close-ended, and scale questions. Results: We found that most discriminatory actions happened more than one time, and most of the actions are carried out by colleagues in daily work, causing negative mental and physical effects. Conclusion: This paper provides an understanding of the causes, forms, and effects of workplace discrimination and discusses concrete suggestions to help reduce workplace discrimination in the software engineering field.General Abstract— Workplace discrimination has detrimental effects: it frustrates employees, diminishes morale, aggravates structural inequities in the labor market, and eventually hurts economic growth and dynamism. Although anti-discrimination laws have been legislated, calling for more fair and equitable working environments, workplace discrimination is a pervasive issue in today’s society. Although research communities have placed a strong emphasis on this issue, there are still considerable gaps in workplace discrimination research in software engineering. To fill this gap, we surveyed employees in software engineering with diverse demographic background about the causes, forms, and effects of their experiences with workplace discrimination. Our study reveals that age, gender, and race are contributing factors to experiencing or witnessing workplace discrimination in software engineering. We also found that many participants chose to "let it go" instead of engaging in effective communication with colleagues or Human Resources. Finally, respondents provided feedback on how companies can decrease discrimination and create a more positive work environment, describing several concrete actions employers can take to reduce discrimination and create a more healthy, equitable, and thriving workplace for every software professional.