Breaking Barriers: Investigating the Sense of Belonging Among Women and Non-Binary Students in Software Engineering

TL;DR

The paper addresses ambient belonging for women and non-binary students in software engineering education by combining a Hans/Hanna-inspired perception survey with nine in-depth interviews. It identifies six social barriers—stereotype threat, imposter syndrome, tokenism, alienation, conditional belonging, and discrimination—while highlighting positive factors such as role models, encouragement, and community that bolster belonging. The mixed-method approach provides nuanced insights into how peer perceptions and educational contexts shape belonging, with implications for teaching practices, student organizations, and policy. Overall, the work contributes to strategies aimed at increasing gender diversity and retention in software engineering within higher education settings.

Abstract

Women in computing were among the first programmers in the early 20th century and were substantial contributors to the industry. Today, men dominate the software engineering industry. Research and data show that women are far less likely to pursue a career in this industry, and those that do are less likely than men to stay in it. Reasons for women and other underrepresented minorities to leave the industry are a lack of opportunities for growth and advancement, unfair treatment and workplace culture. This research explores how the potential to cultivate or uphold an industry unfavourable to women and non-binary individuals manifests in software engineering education at the university level. For this purpose, the study includes surveys and interviews. We use gender name perception as a survey instrument, and the results show small differences in perceptions of software engineering students based on their gender. Particularly, the survey respondents anchor the values of the male software engineer (Hans) to a variety of technical and non-technical skills, while the same description for a female software engineer (Hanna) is anchored mainly by her managerial skills. With interviews with women and non-binary students, we gain insight on the main barriers to their sense of ambient belonging. The collected data shows that some known barriers from the literature such as tokenism, and stereotype threat, do still exist. However, we find positive factors such as role models and encouragement that strengthen the sense of belonging among these students.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Overview of our research method. The shapes distinguish between an activity done by researchers (rounded rectangles) and the corresponding artefacts such as documents, files, etc. (rectangles).
• Figure 2: Diverging plot for the survey answers from Hanna (left) and Hans (right). Note that the questions (y-axis) are ranked based on the proportion of answers (higher agreement are on the top), hence being different for each group.
• Figure 3: Thematic framework over the found social barriers to sense of ambient belonging in software engineering.
• Figure 4: Thematic framework over Positive factors described by the interview participants