Uncovering gender gap in academia: A comprehensive analysis within the software engineering community

Abstract

Gender gap in education has gained considerable attention in recent years, as it carries profound implications for the academic community. However, while the problem has been tackled from a student perspective, research is still lacking from an academic point of view. In this work, our main objective is to address this unexplored area by shedding light on the intricate dynamics of gender gap within the Software Engineering (SE) community. To this aim, we first review how the problem of gender gap in the SE community and in academia has been addressed by the literature so far. Results show that men in SE build more tightly-knit clusters but less global co-authorship relations than women, but the networks do not exhibit homophily. Concerning academic promotions, the Software Engineering community presents a higher bias in promotions to Associate Professors and a smaller bias in promotions to Full Professors than the overall Informatics community.