Register now for the next free ACM SIGSOFT Learning Webinar, "Gender-Inclusivity Software Engineering" presented live on Thursday, April 25 at 12 PM ET by Margaret Burnett, Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University and Anita Sarma, Associate Professor at Oregon State University. Alexander Serebrenik, Associate Professor of software evolution at Eindhoven University of Technology, will moderate the questions and answers session.

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Gender inclusiveness in software companies is receiving a lot of attention these days, but it overlooks a potentially critical factor: software itself. Research shows that different people often work differently with software, and that some of these differences statistically cluster by gender. In this talk, we'll begin by presenting a method we call GenderMag, which can be used to find and fix “inclusivity bugs” — gender biases in software that support people of one gender less well than people of another gender. As we’ll explain, at the core of the method are five facets of cognitive style differences that are also statistically gender differences, drawn from a large body of foundational work from computer science, psychology, education, communications, and women’s studies. We then present some results of using GenderMag on real products — both commercial and open source — and finally focus on practices for taking the method into real-world usage.

Duration: 60 minutes (including audience Q&A)

Presenter:
Margaret Burnett, Professor, Oregon State University
Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. She began her career in industry, where she was the first woman software developer ever hired at Procter & Gamble Ivorydale. A few degrees and start-ups later, she joined academia, with a research focus on people who are engaged in some form of software development. She leads the team that created GenderMag, a software inspection process that uncovers gender inclusiveness issues in software from spreadsheets to programming environments. Burnett is an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and a member of the Academic Alliance Advisory Board of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT).

Presenter:
Anita Sarma, Associate Professor, Oregon State University
Anita Sarma is an Associate Professor at Oregon State University. She performed her Ph.D. work at University of California, Irvine, and was a post-doctoral scholar at Carnegie Mellon University. Sarma's research crosscuts Software Engineering and Human Computer Interaction, and explores how socio-technical dependencies affect team work, how onboarding barriers in open source can be alleviated, and how software can be made gender-inclusive. She leads the GenderMag work investigating gender biases in Open Source Software Communities’ tools and infrastructure, and how to remove such biases. Her work has been funded through a variety of NSF and U.S. Airforce (AFOSR) grants, including the NSF CAREER award.

Moderator:
Alexander Serebrenik, Associate Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology
Alexander Serebrenik (Ph.D., K.U. Leuven, Belgium 2003; MSc, Hebrew University, Israel, 1999), senior member of IEEE, is an Associate Professor of software evolution at Eindhoven University of Technology. His research covers a wide range of topics, from source code analysis to collaborative and human aspects of software engineering. He has studied the impact of gender diversity on productivity and communication within software development teams, as well as emotion in developers' communication. Serebrenik won multiple distinguished contribution awards, is a member of editorial boards of several software engineering journals, and regularly acts as the chair or member of conference program committees, winning six Distinguished Reviewer awards.