Participation of women in software engineering publications

Belén Vela (), Paloma Cáceres () and José María Cavero ()
Additional contact information
Belén Vela: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
Paloma Cáceres: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos
José María Cavero: Universidad Rey Juan Carlos

Scientometrics, 2012, vol. 93, issue 3, No 6, 679 pages

Abstract: Abstract To the best of our knowledge, no works analyzing the participation of women as authors and editors in software engineering research publications currently exist. We have therefore followed a well-defined procedure in order to conduct an empirical study of female participation in 12 leading software engineering journals. We have analyzed the gender of the authors, editorial board members, associate editors and editors-in-chief over a two-year period in order to analyze, on the one hand, the rate of participation of women as authors and as editors in software engineering publications, and on the other, whether women are underrepresented. We have also analyzed the female distribution of authors and editors according to the geographical location of their institutions. This was done by first selecting the journals to be used as the population for data collection which then allowed us to identify female authors of papers and female editors, including the country in which their institutions are located. This eventually led to an analysis of female participation in order to understand representation rates. We analyzed 3,546 authors of 1,266 papers in 61 different countries, and 363 members of editorial boards in 30 different countries. The results of this analysis provide quantitative data concerning the participation of women as authors and editors in major software engineering journals including their distribution per country, in which important differences have been found. The results obtained were first used to compare the participation of women as authors and editors and were then used to carry out a series of simulations in order to be able to statistically confirm whether women are underrepresented. The study shows, amongst other things, that women are not underrepresented as editorial boards members and as editors-in-chief of the journals studied, although their representation as editors-in-chief is low.

Keywords: Gender study; Empirical research; Research publications; Software engineering (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11192-012-0774-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:scient:v:93:y:2012:i:3:d:10.1007_s11192-012-0774-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11192

DOI: 10.1007/s11192-012-0774-x

Access Statistics for this article

Scientometrics is currently edited by Wolfgang Glänzel

More articles in Scientometrics from Springer, Akadémiai Kiadó
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().