# An Empirical Investigation on the Challenges Faced by Women in the Software
Industry: A Case Study

Bianca Trinkenreich  Northern of Arizona UniversityFlagstaff, AZUSA
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Ricardo Britto  Ericsson
Blekinge Institute of TechnologyKalrksonaSweden<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,
Marco A. Gerosa  Northern Arizona UniversityFlagstaff, AZUSA
<EMAIL_ADDRESS>and  Igor Steinmacher  Univ. Tecnológica Federal do
ParanáBrazil<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2021; 2022)

###### Abstract.

Context: Addressing women’s under-representation in the software industry, a
widely recognized concern, requires attracting as well as retaining more
women. Hearing from women practitioners, particularly those positioned in
multi-cultural settings, about their challenges and and adopting their lived
experienced solutions can support the design of programs to resolve the under-
representation issue. Goal: We investigated the challenges women face in
global software development teams, particularly what motivates women to leave
their company; how those challenges might break down according to
demographics; and strategies to mitigate the identified challenges. Method: To
achieve this goal, we conducted an exploratory case study in Ericsson, a
global technology company. We surveyed 94 women and employed mixed-methods to
analyze the data. Results: Our findings reveal that women face socio-cultural
challenges, including work-life balance issues, benevolent and hostile sexism,
lack of recognition and peer parity, impostor syndrome, glass ceiling bias
effects, the prove-it-again phenomenon, and the maternal wall. The
participants of our research provided different suggestions to
address/mitigate the reported challenges, including sabbatical policies,
flexibility of location and time, parenthood support, soft skills training for
managers, equality of payment and opportunities between genders, mentoring and
role models to support career growth, directives to hire more women, inclusive
groups and events, women’s empowerment, and recognition for women’s success.
The framework of challenges and suggestions can inspire further initiatives
both in academia and industry to onboard and retain women.

women, diversity, gender, inclusion, software engineering

††copyright: acmcopyright††journalyear: 2021††conference: SEIS ’22: Software
Engineering in Society; May 21–29, 2022; Pittsburgh, PA††booktitle: SEIS ’21:
Software Engineering in Society, May 21–29, 2018, Pittsburgh, PA††journalyear:
2022††copyright: acmcopyright††conference: Software Engineering in Society;
May 21–29, 2022; Pittsburgh, PA, USA††booktitle: Software Engineering in
Society (ICSE-SEIS’22), May 21–29, 2022, Pittsburgh, PA, USA††price:
15.00††doi: 10.1145/3510458.3513018††isbn: 978-1-4503-9227-3/22/05

## Lay Abstract

Women represent less than 24% of employees in software development industry
and experience various types of prejudice and bias. Even in companies that
care about Diversity & Inclusion, “untying the mooring ropes” of socio-
cultural problems is hard. Hearing from women, especially those working in a
multi-cultural organization, about their challenges and adopting their
suggestions can be vital to design programs and resolve the under-
representation issue. In this work we work closely with a large software
development organization which invests and believes in diversity and
inclusion. We listened to women and the challenges they face in global
software development teams of this company and what these women suggest reduce
the problems and increase retention. Our research showed that women face work-
life balance issues and encounter invisible barriers that prevent them from
rising to top positions. They also suffer micro-aggression and sexism, need to
show competence constantly, be supervised in essential tasks, and receive less
work after becoming mothers. Moreover, women miss having more female
colleagues, lack self-confidence and recognition. The women from the company
suggested sabbatical policies, the flexibility of location and time,
parenthood support, soft skills training for managers, equality of
opportunities, role models to support career growth, directives to hire more
women, support groups, and more interaction between women, inclusive groups
and events, women’s empowerment by publishing their success stories in media
and recognizing their achievements. Our results had been shared with the
company Human Resources department and management and they considered the
diagnosis helpful and will work on actions to mitigate the challenges that
women still perceive.

##  1\. Introduction

Diverse software teams are more likely to understand user needs, contributing
to a better alignment between the delivered software and its intended
customers (Muller and Kuhn, 1993). Diversity further positively affects
productivity by bringing together different perspectives (Vasilescu et al.,
2015b) and fosters innovation and problem-solving capacity, leading to a
healthier work environment (Earley and Mosakowski, 2000). However, women are
still underrepresented in the software industry (Hyrynsalmi, 2019). Reducing
the gender gap in the software industry requires not only attracting, but also
retaining women.

Women111In this study, we use the term “gender” as a socially constructed
concept (Butler, 1999), where gender identification, display, and performance
might or might not align with a person’s sex assigned at birth. To reflect
this social concept of gender, we use the term “women” and “men” as a
shorthand for people who self-identify as such. often face socio-cultural
challenges in the software industry and could decide to leave their jobs (or
even the software industry) if diversity is not a priority (Lee and Carver,
2019). Gender-related incidents can be so severe that they motivate women to
leave a project or their jobs (Paul et al., 2019; Vasilescu et al., 2015a).
Kuechler et al. (Kuechler et al., 2012) suggest that women drop out because
their jobs are not aligned to their motivations or due to the unappealing and
hostile social dynamics in their daily work. Understanding the reasons behind
the decision to step out of a project or role can help create strategies to
increase retention.

Challenges faced by women have been largely investigated in the free and open
source software (F/OSS) development context (e.g., (Lee and Carver, 2019;
Balali et al., 2018; Powell et al., 2010; Canedo et al., 2020; Imtiaz et al.,
2019; Singh, 2019; Calvo, 2021; Nafus, 2012; Paul et al., 2019; Qiu et al.,
2019; Terrell et al., 2017; Vedres and Vasarhelyi, 2019; Vasilescu et al.,
2015a)). Although there are a few studies focusing on software companies
(Canedo et al., 2021; Wolff et al., 2020; Musungwini et al., 2020; Orser et
al., 2012), the results are still preliminary and more studies are needed to
contribute to theory building. In this context, theory is built by aggregating
results from case studies and related qualitative research by making
comparisons, looking for similarities and differences within the collected
data, and by examining future questions (Lawrence Neuman, 2014).

In this paper, we contribute to this scientific body of knowledge by reporting
a case study in a multi-cultural global software development organization from
a large company, namely Ericsson, which is a global private company that has
more than 100,000 employees around the world, and is one of the leading
providers of Information and Communication Technology (ICT). One of the
Diversity & Inclusion business goals of the company is to reach at least 25%
proportion of women in every suborganization of the company. However, the
software development organization still struggles to attract and retain women
and has partnered with external researchers to understand the challenges and
strategies from the point of view of the women themselves. As the phenomenon
under study is complex because it involves different perspectives and
disciplines, it is critical to consider how women perceive and give meaning to
their social reality.

Therefore, our goal is to identify the challenges that women face in the
company, according to them, and investigate the measures that women recommend
to mitigate the identified challenges. To achieve our goal, we defined the
following research questions:
RQ1: What challenges do women face in software teams?
RQ2: What are possible actions to mitigate the identified challenges, from the
women’s perspectives?

To answer our research questions, we collected data through an online
questionnaire that included questions about the challenges that are currently
being faced, reasons women would decide to leave, and suggestions to increase
women’s participation. The questionnaire was answered by 94 women from a
software development suborganization of Ericsson. The novelty of the work
includes considering a multi-cultural global software development organization
from a large IT company, breaking down the challenges according to
demographics, identifying challenges that push women out of the company, and
connecting challenges to potential strategies to attract and retain women from
the point of view of the women themselves, who are on the front lines of the
problem.

We introduce our research design in Section 2 and the study results in Section
3. Section 4 discusses the results and implications of our results, followed
by related work in Section 5, limitations, and conclusions in Sections 6 and
7.

##  2\. Research Design

To answer our research questions, we conducted an exploratory case study
(Runeson et al., 2012) via a questionnaire administered to women from one of
the software development suborganizations of Ericsson. In this section, we
describe the case and the phases of planning, data collection, and analysis.

###  2.1. The Case and Unit of Analysis

The case and unit of analysis is one of Ericsson’s software development
organizations. Ericsson is a global and large company that develops
telecommunications-related products. It has more than 100,000 employees who
are geographically distributed in several countries, including India, Sweden,
Canada, USA, Poland, Brazil, and Germany.

To diagnose how the company is doing in terms of gender diversity, every year,
Ericsson222http://www.ericsson.com publishes a diversity report with the
percentage of employees who identify themselves as
women333https://www.ericsson.com/en/investors/financial-reports/annual-
reports. The company has a goal to achieve at least 25% of women as employees
in all suborganizations. This percentage was achieved for the whole company in
2020, but not in a consistent way in every suborganization. One of the
software development organizations still dominated by men (the name of which
is omitted for confidentially reasons) decided to conduct a systematic
research to understand the viewpoint of the women who currently work at the
company, in order to plan informed and bottom-up actions to mitigate the
reported challenges. The company is interested in understanding the challenges
women report as well as their suggestions to improve the current situation, as
a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context (Yin, 2009). This case
study was collaboratively conducted by one researcher from the company and
three outsiders.

###  2.2. Data Collection

We administered an online questionnaire 444The research protocol was approved
by the university institutional review board (IRB). using the Qualtrics
tool555http://www.qualtrics.com to employees from the software development
suborganization who self-identify as women. We opted for a questionnaire
instead of interviews to increase participation and coverage of the research.
The questionnaire was designed to understand the state of the problem, asking
open questions about the challenges faced, the reasons that drove women they
know to leave the company, and their suggestions to retain more women in the
company. The demographic questions were the last part of the questionnaire,
and were chosen to help us investigate possible relations between groups.
Although family is universal to all genders, women culturally face a greater
pressure to balance work and family (Sturges and Guest, 2004). Considering
women as the target population of the present study, besides country, age, and
experience, we included demographics questions to understand possible
intersections of the challenges and family status. All questions were optional
to increase the response rate by making respondents more comfortable (Punter
et al., 2003). After proofreading and testing in multiple browsers and
devices, we invited three participants to pilot the questionnaire so we could
collect feedback and measure the time to answer. No modification of the
questionnaire was necessary, and we discarded these initial answers.

The managers of the company software teams sent emails to the women on their
teams with the questionnaire link. Every week, the first author of this paper
followed up with the company’s manager to check the number of answers and
identify sites that needed additional encouragement.

The questionnaire was open for answers between June 11 and July 20, 2021. Our
questionnaire received 94 non-blank answers. We report the demographics of the
respondents in Table 1. Most of the respondents were residents of India
(65.6%), less than 35 years old (50.0%), married (62.8%), living with children
(52.1%), having more than 10 years of experience in the software industry
(45.7%) and less than 5 years working in the company (35.1%). A balanced
proportion of respondents have and do not have children living with them. The
sample mirrors the company’s numbers. In 2020, the prevalent nationality (55%)
of the employees from the studied suborganization was from India. Although we
do not have data about the employees’ age of each suborganization, 31% of the
overall number of employees age less than 35 years old. The other demographics
are not measured by the company’s annual report.

Table 1. Personal characteristics of the respondents (n=94) Demographics | # | %
---|---|---
Experience: $\leq$ 5 years in software industry | 12 | 12.8%
Experience: $>$ 5 & $<$ 10 years in software industry | 21 | 22.3%
Experience: $\geq$ 10 years in software industry | 43 | 45.7%
Did not inform | 18 | 19.1%
Tenure: $\leq$ 5 years in Ericsson | 33 | 35.1%
Tenure: $>$ 5 & $<$ 10 years in Ericsson | 26 | 27.7%
Tenure: $\geq$ 10 years in Ericsson | 24 | 25.5%
Did not inform | 11 | 11.7%
Age: Less than 35 | 47 | 50.0%
Age: 35 to 44 | 27 | 28.7%
Age: 45 to 54 | 10 | 10.6%
Did not inform | 10 | 10.6%
Country: India | 61 | 64.9%
Country: Brazil | 11 | 11.7%
Country: Canada | 8 | 8.5%
Country: Others | 5 | 5.3%
Did not inform | 9 | 9.6%
Marital Status: Married or domestic partnership | 59 | 62.8%
Marital Status: Single or divorced | 24 | 25.5%
Did not inform | 11 | 11.7%
Have children living with: Yes | 49 | 52.1%
Have children living with: No | 36 | 38.3%
Did not inform | 9 | 9.6%

We filtered our data to consider only valid responses. We manually inspected
the open text questions, looking for blank answers. Instead of removing the
entire response when one of the questions was blank or did not report
challenges or suggestions, we separated data into two datasets of 94 answers
each: one dataset for challenges and one dataset for suggestions. Then, we
named each respondent from S1 to S94, removed blanks for each dataset (3
removed from challenges and 15 for suggestions). Next, we removed the answers
that were not informing any challenge or suggestion (27 removed from
challenges who reported that they do not face any challenge and 9 from the
suggestions who reported having no proposed solutions). The final step was to
check potential duplicate participation, even though the tool used in our
investigation (Qualtrics) has mechanisms to prevent multiples responses from
the same participant. The final challenges’ dataset had 64 answers, while the
suggestions’ dataset had 70 answers.

###  2.3. Data Analysis

To answer both RQ1 and RQ2, we analyzed the responses to the open questions
about challenges, reasons for leaving, and suggestions to increase women’s
participation in the company. The first author qualitatively analyzed the
answers for the open questions by inductively applying open coding(Miles and
Huberman, 1994) to organize what participants reported. We then organized our
categories following concepts from existent theories, such as sexism (hostile
and benevolent) (Glick and Fiske, 1996), impostor syndrome (Clance and Imes,
1978), maternal wall (Williams and Bornstein, 2007), prove-it again (Biernat
and Kobrynowicz, 1997), glass ceiling (Jackson, 2001; Sharma and Sehrawat,
2014), work-life balance issues (Guest, 2002), lack of peer parity (Ford et
al., 2017), and lack of recognition (Arlow, 1955). We built post-formed codes,
having three of the authors conducting card sorting sessions (Spencer, 2009),
including discussing the codes and categorization until reaching consensus
about the the codes and the corresponding literature.

After completing the qualitative analysis, we checked the distribution of
answers categorized in each challenge. From the 64 women who reported they
face some type(s) of challenges, 34 reported challenges related to only one
category, 25 to two different categories, 3 to three categories, and 2 women
reported challenges related to four categories. We also used descriptive
statistics to summarize the responses and their association with the
demographics data (Wohlin and Aurum, 2015).

To analyze how the challenges differ according to individual characteristics,
we segmented our sample based on _experience in software industry_
(experienced: $\geq$ 10 years of experience vs. less experienced: $\leq$ 10
years of experience), _tenure or years in company_(more years in company:
$\geq$ 10 years in company vs. less years in company: $\leq$ 10 years in
company), _age_ (older: $\geq$ median, 35 years old vs. younger: $<$ median,
35 years old), _married or not_ , and _lives, or not, with children_.

See supplementary material666https://figshare.com/s/d1c3bd386083fa55104a for
additional details, including the answers to the demographics, the open
questions and the qualitative analysis codes.

Next, we calculated the odds ratio for each challenge and demographic
information. We interpreted the results as follows:

  * •

if Odds Ratio $=$ 1, both groups are equally distributed for the reported
challenge.

  * •

if Odds Ratio $>$ 1, the likelihood for the reported challenge is higher for
the first group (in our case: experienced, older than 35, married and living
with children).

  * •

if Odds Ratio $<$ 1, the likelihood for the reported challenge is higher for
the second group (in our case: novices, younger than 35 years, single or
divorced, without children).

##  3\. Study Results

In this section, we present the results of our investigation, which are
grouped by research question.

###  3.1. RQ1: What challenges do women face in software development teams?

We found eight challenge categories, as presented in Fig. 1. We marked with an
asterisk (*) the challenges reported by at least one person as a reason to
leave the company. Table 2 presents the number of participants whose responses
fit in each category. In the following, we present more details about our
findings organized by challenge category.

Table 2. Representative examples of answers to the challenges’ open question,
number and percentage of women whose answer was coded for each category. In
parenthesis the number of women who reported that challenge as a reason to
leave.

Challenge | Representative examples | # | % (n=64)
---|---|---|---
| Work-Life
---
Balance Issues
| “To be successful, any professional is expected to work super-hard and go
far and beyond,
---
working overtime, constantly learn new things and this takes a lot of energy,
but after my
working hours end, my home, my second and more important work starts…” (S40)
35 (25) | 54.7%
Sexism |  | “In technical discussions, people feel that women cannot do it better so they make
---
comments which are makes you uncomfortable” (S23)
14 (3) | 21.9%
Lack of Recognition |  “Lack of praise” (S38). Not been recognized by the job” (S63) | 2 (2) | 3.1%
Lack of Peer Parity |  | “Working in a place where there is a dominant number of male colleagues, inclusion in all
---
discussions might not be uniform across” (S43)
9 | 14.1%
Impostor Syndrome |  | “When it comes to failure, the failures are easily owned and personalised by a women
---
and they on resign their own compared to men” (S57)
2 (1) | 3.1%
Glass Ceiling |  |  “Glass roof, only a few women as leaders” (S38). “When women try to achieve more things
---
they are called ambitious in a negative way. Whereas men are expected to.”
(S11)
26 (19) | 40.6%
Prove-it Again |  | “As a woman I need to work harder to achieve the same as a man. I need to show
---
competence and to be 100% right all the time.” (S25)
9 | 14.1%
Maternal Wall |  | “Some people treat you differently because you just had a kid, giving you less work [..]
---
and framing you inside a box” (S79).
4 (1) | 6.3%

The total per challenge is not the sum of the respondents since the
participants often provided an answer that was categorized into more than one
challenge.
---

Figure 1. The challenges reported by women who participated in our study.
Those marked with an asterisk (*) were reported as a challenge that ultimately
can lead women to leave the company.

####  3.1.1. Work-Life Balance Issues

Our participants reported that before the COVID-19 pandemic the company was
strict to the physical location and many women left due to facing the
“trailing spouse” effect (Harvey, 1998; Brandén, 2014), moving to another city
or country when their spouse was relocated.

After the COVID-19 pandemic and suddenly working from home, women reported
facing pressure to work extra hours, “having no boundary set for working
hours” (S24), and having to either attend meetings in different time zones or
to learn new knowledge for the work. They also mentioned the consequences for
not giving in to this pressure: they would be excluded from decisions that are
made during the meetings and are perceived by others as “lacking in teamwork”
(S30).

When working extra and long hours, women feel stressed and have trouble
disconnecting from work, “impacting other household chores and having hardly
any time left to bring some peace to the mind” (S49). The lack of well-being
support causes high levels of stress, which would be one of the reasons to
quit.

Besides the inflexible location, our participants also mentioned that before
the COVID-19 they lacked flexible work hours (which improved during the
pandemic) and paid sick leave (specific for one location, for which the local
laws do not cover this). These points are really important for those who have
parenting and caretaking responsibilities, though. Lack of daycare in the
office was associated with lack of parental support, which can cause women to
leave the company.

####  3.1.2. Sexism

The ambivalent sexism theory (Glick and Fiske, 1996) defines sexism as a
multidimensional construct that includes two sets of attitudes: hostile and
benevolent. Sexism has typically been conceptualized as a reflection of
hostility toward women (Glick and Fiske, 1996). Hostile sexism is related to
the classic definition of prejudice (Allport et al., 1954).

Our participants from our investigation reported microaggressions in which
their “voices are suppressed per opposite gender” (S19). Besides not being
heard during technical discussions, women receive various diminishing
comments, such as that women cannot bring the same results as men and that
“women come to work only for time pass or are not brilliant enough” (S85).
Exposure to such diminishing comments can be a reason to leave.

Benevolent sexism represents the subjectively positive feelings toward a
gender that often bring some sexist antipathy (Glick and Fiske, 1996). The
participants reported being “pampered, never been given a hard/straight
feedback” (S57) and being included in initiatives only because they are women,
not because of their skills and capacity.

####  3.1.3. Lack of Recognition

Feeling valued or appreciated is part of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs
(Arlow, 1955). The participants mentioned “Not been recognized by her job”
(S63) and that women’s results are usually evaluated as OK, never as excellent
(S57), even when accomplishing exceptional work. No praises from managers was
considered one of the reasons to leave.

####  3.1.4. Lack of Peer Parity

Being surrounded by similar individuals to which to compare oneself, or
identifying with at least one other peer in the team, is known as peer parity
(Ford et al., 2017).

The participants mentioned an “[im]balance in men:women ratio” (S37) and two
consequences: (i) impact on their social capital, as they considered it “hard
to collaborate socially” (S55), “[be]cause men socialize in a different way
than women do” (S12); and (ii) impact on developing their self-confidence due
to lack of role models, as they “lack [] strong women leaders as mentors”
(S14).

####  3.1.5. Impostor Syndrome

Impostor Syndrome (also known as impostor phenomenon, fraud syndrome,
perceived fraudulence, or impostor experience), describes an experience of
individuals who, despite their objective successes, struggle to internalize
their accomplishments, feel persistent self-doubt, and being exposed as a
fraud or impostor (Clance and Imes, 1978).

Our participants mentioned as a challenge and reason to leave situations in
which women personalize failures and “feel ashamed and inferior more than men
and they tend to escape it by leaving [the company], but always masked as
personal reasons” (S6).

####  3.1.6. Glass Ceiling

describes a corporate world phenomenon in which minorities’ access to the top-
management positions is blocked by tradition or culture (Jackson, 2001), as an
invisible structural barrier that prevent minorities from career advancement
(Sharma and Sehrawat, 2014).

Two reasons to leave reported by the participants included the perception of
pay inequality between genders and inferior career growth opportunities for
women. For the former, S30 stated that “women employees are paid less compared
to male counterparts”, while for the last, S69 mentioned that she “reach[ed] a
stage where [they] have nowhere to [climb next] in the ladder” (S69). Still,
women reported that they feel that they work harder to achieve the same
positions as men, indicating a possible lack of transparency about the ladder
criteria, as their ambition is discouraged, while “corporate politics are
played by men” (S21) and men lift only their counterparts to top layer.

####  3.1.7. Prove-it Again

effect is a bias that occurs when a member of a group that does not align with
stereotypes is measured at a stricter standard than those who do align with
the stereotypes and, consequently, has to constantly provide more evidence to
demonstrate competence (Biernat and Kobrynowicz, 1997).

The participants mentioned that women need to show competence all the time:
“put extra effort to be heard when there is competition between men” (S84) and
having “ no room to slip [up]” (S41). Lastly, women feel they need to prove
themselves when receiving an important task, [as] they are supervised by
another person to guarantee they do it correctly (S65).

####  3.1.8. Maternal Wall

describes the experience of mothers whose coworkers perceive and judge them as
having made one of two choices: either they continue to work and neglect their
family, making the mother less likable, or the mother prioritizes family over
work, making them less reliable in the workplace (Williams and Bornstein,
2007). Our participants reported that women who are mothers receive [fewer]
responsibilities because they have kids, as they are believed to not be able
to handle much work. One of them reported “surprising colleagues that [they]
are able to handle it all” (S7). In addition, one of the reasons that cause
women to leave is that “when returning from maternity leave, not enough
support is provided or generally the woman is asked to step down from the
role” (S38).

Table 3. Odds ratios per personal characteristic |  | More Experienced
---
vs. Less Experienced
| More Years in Company
---
vs. Less Years in Company
| Older vs.
---
Younger
| Married
---
vs. Single
| Child vs.
---
no child
Work-Life Balance Issues | 3.17** | 1.09 | 2.51 | 5.08** | 3.29
Glass Ceiling | 0.48 | 1.29 | 0.38 | 0.76 | 1.46
Sexism | 0.46 | 0.34 | 0.47 | 0.37 | 2.13
Significance codes: * $p<0.10$, ** $p<0.05$ *** $p<0.01$. |
Note: Odds ratio $>$ 1 means that the first segment has greater chances of
reporting the challenge than the second. Ratio $<$ 1 means the opposite. The
challenges were coded from the open question.

####  3.1.9. A segmented look at the challenges perceived by women

In addition to the categorization described above, we took a deeper look into
the results to understand the prevailing reports of challenges among our
respondents and across different demographics. We avoid using the numerical
prevalence of evidence to indicate the importance or criticality of any
challenge. However, when presenting the results, we use supplementary and
corroborative counting of the responses to triangulate the qualitative
analysis (Hannah and Lautsch, 2011). The majority of respondents reported
challenges related to Work-Life Balance Issues (54.7%), Glass Ceiling (40.6%),
and Sexism (21.9%). Figure 2 illustrates those three categories of challenges
for each demographic.

We used the most representative demographic subgroup (see Table 1) to present
the percentages, which reflect the number of participants who mentioned any
difficulties that were classified under each category of challenge. Most of
the respondents who reported challenges related to work-life balance issues
are married and live in India, with proportions higher than 80%. No
demographic was so prevalent for glass ceiling and sexism, demonstrating that
both challenges were reported by a broader subgroup.

Figure 2. Subgroup analysis of the top three categories of challenges. The
opacity of the icons represents the percentage of each category of challenge.
Darker means a higher and lighter a lower percentage. The percentage below
each challenge represents the number of respondents who reported that
challenge. Some respondents provided answers about challenges that accounted
for more than one category.

We also calculated the odds ratio for each of the three most reported
challenges, considering the demographics detailed in Section 2.3. Table 3
presents the results of the odds ratio for each category of challenge.
According to our sample, women with more experience in the software industry
have higher odds (3.62x) than those with less experience to report challenges
related to work-life balance issues. The odds that married women report
challenges related to work-life balance issues are 5.08x higher than for
single or divorced women.

When analyzing the intersectionality of the demographics, we learned that all
of the 20 women who have more than 10 years of experience in the software
industry and reported challenges that were categorized into work-life balance
issues are married or live in a domestic relationship with children. Regarding
the glass ceiling, we also observed that more than the half of the women who
reported this challenge have more than 10 years of experience in the software
industry, are married or live in a domestic relationship, and live with
children.

We found eight categories of challenges, with the most mentioned ones
categorized into work-life balance issues, glass ceiling, and sexism. Women
from our sample with more experience in the software industry and who were
married were more likely to report challenges related to work-life balance
issues.

###  3.2. RQ2: What are possible actions to mitigate the identified
challenges, from the women’s perspectives?

We now present the actions recommended by the participants to help mitigate
the challenges and retain more women in the company. Our analysis revealed six
categories that explain the actions suggested by women, which we present in
Fig. 3.

Table 4 presents the number of participants whose responses fit in each
category. Most of the respondents suggested the company Hire More Women
(35.7%), Support Work-Life Balance (30.0%), and Embrace Equality (28.6%). We
used the most representative demographic subgroup (see Table 1) to present the
percentages, which reflect the number of participants who mentioned any
difficulties that were classified under each category of suggestion. In the
following, we present our findings organized by category.

Table 4. Representative examples of answers to the suggestions’ open question,
number and percentage of women whose answer were coded for each category

Suggestion | Representative examples | # | % (n=70)
---|---|---|---
| Embrace Equality
---
| ‘Speaking gender-diversity alone will not be suffice, it should also be
reflected in the equal payouts
---
of deserving female candidates” (S28)
20 | 28.6%
| Support Women’s
---
Career Growth
| “Promoting women to senior jobs and leadership would help younger talents to
identify
---
themselves with the company, giving them confidence and more prospects of
continuing their
career in the company” (S65)
14 | 20.0%
| Hire More
---
Women
|  “Active search for female talents” (S39) Conduct women-only drives to hire
fresh talent from girls
---
colleges.” (S59) “Publicize openings in workshops that are focused on women in
market” (S63)
25 | 35.7%
| Promote Women’s
---
Groups and Events
Women
|  “Virtual meetings, debates..” (S66) “diversity events, so minorities to
feel more valued.” (S40)
---
3 | 4.3%
| Empower Women
---
| “Be more active on social media and do external open talks with woman from
Ericsson talking
---
about their work.” (S10) “Deserving women should be recognized and rewarded”
(S28)
7 | 10.0%
| Support
---
Work-Life Balance
| ‘Flexible work hours, and to focus on ensuring work-life balance.
Workaholics tend to breach the
---
latter, not just their own, but the team’s too in a collaborative
environment.” (S43)
‘Enable women taking a break from career due to motherhood to return to the
workforce. That is
where we loose them.” (S2)
21 | 30.0%

The total per suggestion of improvement is not the sum of the respondents
since the participants often provided an answer that was categorized into more
than one suggestion.
---

Figure 3. Strategies suggested by women for the company to increase women in
software development teams

####  3.2.1. Embrace Equality

Using the definition provided by UNESCO: “Gender equality exists when all
genders enjoy the same status and have equal conditions, treatment, and
opportunities for realizing their full potential, human rights and for
contributing to and benefiting from economic, social, cultural and political
development.” (Sharp, 2016).

In terms of cultural improvements, the participants suggested the company
train all managers in soft skills to have more empathy and avoid burnout in
their teams, so they can also respect and give voice to women.

In terms of process improvements, participants called for more equality in
terms of payment, opportunities, and challenges. Providing “equal payment
between genders” (S28), “equal opportunities without considering whether it is
a women who is applying” (S88), and “giving [women] equal challenges like
[those] given to the male employees which allow them to venture into more of
learning and become confident” (S54).

Finally, our participants asked to “not allocate women only in procedural
tasks, but include [them] in projects in which they feel [they are a] part [of
the team], responsible and that can challenge their skills” (S62). This can
give them equal opportunities and break the glass ceiling.

####  3.2.2. Support Women’s Career Growth

To break the glass ceiling, the participants mentioned the need to encourage
women to advance in their career, “moving ahead in other streams apart from
people management roles as well and having more women in technical leadership
roles where very few women seem to step in” (S30).

Mentoring can “help younger talents to identify themselves and give them
confidence and more prospects of continuing their career in the company”
(S65). Prepare women to advance in career laddering by mentoring by other
women who are role models, which can happen during “programs for women in
leadership roles”, “showing them how to grow, by teaching the skills that will
help them get recognized in the crowd and make her feel valued” (S42).

####  3.2.3. Hire More Women

To hire more women, our participants suggested changes to the job
opportunities the company offers and to the recruitment process, and to invest
in marketing Ṙegarding the job opportunities, they suggest the company make
them attractive to women’s needs, create more part-time positions, and reserve
positions prioritized for internal candidates and women.

Regarding the action related to change to the recruitment process, besides
having more women as recruiters, the suggestions included transparency about
the required skills, advertising job openings to women’s groups and events,
and raising awareness about how the company supports women’s growth. Finally,
the suggestions included base-level actions like investing in programs to
attract girls to STEM, and being “active in the social media that are accessed
by the audience (e.g., Snap/Instagram)” (S90) so they would be “securing more
talent women to join” (S38) and “from a fresher level” (S58).

####  3.2.4. Promote Women’s Groups and Events

Considering that many teams still have only a few women, our participants
mentioned that the lack of parity can be mitigated by havingwomen’s support
groups and events for “interaction between women from different departments”
(S81). The events were suggested to target not only women, but “to celebrate
differences and diversity (gender, cultural, age), so that minorities feel
more valued” (S40).

####  3.2.5. Empower Women

Empowerment is a strong strategy to fight the impostor syndrome (Clance and
OToole, 1987) and one of the strategies to foster it is recognition (Manohar,
2001). The study participants recommended recognition and achievements’
rewards. Moreover, since women’s empowerment refers to enhancement of their
power and position in society, some participants suggested that “sharing the
stories of [the company’s] women can encourage and motivate women employees in
achieving the same” (S49). Morever, empowerment could be achieved by
“publishing women’s success stories in social media” (S47) and external
events.

####  3.2.6. Support Work-Life Balance

Sabbaticals are paid leaves for personal and professional development reasons
(Miller and Kang, 1998) to promote well-being, and are also beneficial for the
company, as they increase future productivity (Davidson et al., 2010). The
participants suggested to implement sabbatical policies so they can “take a
break from [their] career” (S2) to rest, dedicate some time to their family,
and acquire new knowledge.

Another suggestion was to “discourage extra hours, as the workaholics tend to
breach the latter, not just their own, but the team’s too in a collaborative
environment” (S43).

Maternity leaves usually relate to each country’s law. Some countries mandate
a long maternity leave, while others mandate a shorter one (Givati and
Troiano, 2012). The participants protested that “maternity leaves should not
be considered an impediment for a woman to grow” (S54) and asked for the
company to assist maternity by implementing own rules to extend the paid leave
to 1 year, even “beyond local laws of the country” (S22).

Participants called for actions to embrace equality and help reduce the sexist
culture inside the company, and to mitigate the biases that create maternity
wall and prove-it-again effects. Initiatives to support women’s growth were
suggested to start breaking the glass ceiling. Hiring more women and
organizing women’s groups could foster peer parity, and women’s empowerment
could reduce impostor syndrome and provide recognition. Sabbaticals and
discouraging long work hours were mentioned as ways to improve the work-life
balance.

##  4\. Discussion

In this section, we present a more in-depth discussion of our results in the
context of the literature.

Work-Life Balance Issues faced by mothers. Work and family are the two most
important domains in a person’s life and their interface has been the object
of study for researchers worldwide (Sturges and Guest, 2004). As women assume
the role of working professional in addition to their traditional role of
homemaker, they are under great pressure to balance their work and personal
lives (Sturges and Guest, 2004). The societal role expectations, women’s
career ambitions, and the nature of the IT industry challenges the way women
manage their professional and personal lives (Haq, 2013). The COVID-19
pandemic and the need to work from home cast new light on these issues. While
it brought more flexibility to many workers (which is the case of the company
studied), it also brought new challenges (Ford et al., 2020; Ralph et al.,
2020). For a great share of the population, it became hard to separate
personal and professional life. Women felt this more than men, given the
aforementioned societal expectations(Machado et al., 2020).

Work-life balance is a challenge that happens in and beyond the IT industry.
In Japan, work-life balance is a general challenge, and the low numbers of
women in medicine reflect the societal belief that careers and motherhood do
not mix (Ramakrishnan et al., 2014). In contrast, Scandinavia has similar
numbers of men and women physicians, which has coincided with the emergence of
progressive work–life policies, the belief that women can combine motherhood
and employment, and changing expectations of work-life balance. This shows
that it is possible and that the mindset in the software industry needs to
change.

The lack of parent support is one of the major challenges that Indian
companies within the IT sector have been trying to navigate over the past
decade to ensure a gender inclusive workplace (Raghuram et al., 2017). This is
reinforced by our work,in which women provided suggestions on how to improve
parental policies to support families and mitigate this challenge, as we
showed is Section 3.2. Sponsoring child care, preferentially in the office and
specially for young children, providing adequate maternity leave beyond the
relevant country’s laws, and also providing more flexibility in work hours and
location were some of the suggestions for the company to take in order to
mitigate the challenges of work-life balance issues related to motherhood.
This is harder to implement in many cases due to the countries’ legislation
and the local culture, which influence how organizational policies are
defined.

Prepare women to break the glass ceiling. Analogous to the IT industry,
women’s barriers in the medical profession and their ability to rise to
leadership positions are also influenced by social and cultural context
(Ramakrishnan et al., 2014). Similar to software teams, where women are
instrumental to reducing community smells (Catolino et al., 2019), in
international relations the collaboration between women delegates and women
civil society groups positively impacts and brings more durable peace when
negotiating peace agreements (Krause et al., 2018). By analyzing the career
trajectories of women executives across a variety of sectors, Glass and Cook
(Glass and Cook, 2016) concluded that while attaining promotion to leadership
is not easy, serving in a high position can be even more challenging. Although
women can be more likely than men to be empowered to high-risk leadership
positions, they often lack the support or authority to accomplish their
strategic goals. As a result, women leaders often experience shorter tenures
compared to their peers who are men (Glass and Cook, 2016).

The respondents provided suggestions to support their career growth to
mitigate this challenge, including having women to inspire, encourage and
mentor other women, as we showed is Section 3.2. Providing training for
mentors on topics such as speaking up on behalf of women who are being
disrespected in meetings, managing bias in the workplace, and raising
awareness of micro-aggressions at work are some examples of what should be
included as part of standard training and preparation for mentors (Giscombe,
2017). The mentoring program can start by having a different woman leader each
month discuss her career trajectory and the benefits and challenges of holding
her job. Women could share their techniques for managing time, balancing
family and career demands, making themselves heard by men, and highlighting
how they learn new skills on a regular basis (Yen et al., 2005). Besides
joining ongoing support groups, women can be assigned to formal mentors for
one-on-one regular meetings (Kosoko-Lasaki et al., 2006).

Combining synergistic suggestions. One option for companies looking to improve
women’s participation is to combine strategies that are synergistic. The
company can start by implementing simple, but structured actions combining
ideas from more than one strategy. For example, by publishing success stories
of women on media, the company can empower women and also attract and hire
more women. Another action that combines synergistic strategies is to arrange
women-only groups and analyze messages to implement feasible changes to
problems that are being actively discussed and could potentially cause women
to leave, as when women report facing hostile sexism. The literature reports
that women experience computing environments differently due to sexism and
racism, both historically and as part of the current culture (Barker et al.,
2009; Margolis and Fisher, 2002; Margolis et al., 2017; Strayhorn, 2012),
potentially leading them to feel unwelcome and lacking of sense of belonging
(Sax et al., 2018), and ultimately to leave (Espinosa, 2011).

Some problems come from beyond the company gates. Even in a company like
Ericsson, which cares about Diversity & Inclusion, “untying the mooring ropes”
of socio-cultural problems is difficult. Historically, the social differences
influenced by gender roles (i.e., the roles that men and women are expected to
occupy based on their sex) may be amplified because of the gendered division
of housework and child care tasks, especially for mothers of young children.
Impostor syndrome (Wolff et al., 2020; Lee and Carver, 2019; Balali et al.,
2018), Sexism (Canedo et al., 2021; Singh, 2019; Calvo, 2021; Nafus, 2012),
Lack of Peer Parity (Powell et al., 2010; Canedo et al., 2020), Prove-it-Again
(Imtiaz et al., 2019), Glass Ceiling (Canedo et al., 2021) and Work-Life
Balance issues (Machado et al., 2020; Lee and Carver, 2019) were challenges
reported by women from the present study and also reported by both women in
other software development contexts and in F/OSS. Some problems surpass the
organization and are related to the local culture of the employees and
managers. There are problems that go beyond the company’s gates and bump into
the society, which many times contributes to this cultural legacy. One example
is the “trailing spouse”, when a person who follows his or her life partner to
another city because of a work assignment (Harvey, 1998; Brandén, 2014).
Moreover, during the COVID-19 pandemic, a longer “double-shift” of paid and
unpaid work in a context of school closures and limited availability of care
services have contributed to an overall increase in stress, anxiety around job
insecurity, and difficulty in maintaining work-life balance among women with
children (glo, 2021). However, there is also space for improvement in the
organization, and Ericsson is committed to implementing the suggested changes
to mitigate the challenges faced by its women employees.

###  4.1. Implications to the company

We presented the results to the managers of the studied suborganization and to
the managers of Human Resources department. The feedback was very positive
regarding the usefulness of the research. Managers considered the results
helpful for the company to understand the current situation and to decide
about actions can mitigate the challenges that women currently face and avoid
them leaving the company. For the suggestions that are already in place, such
as publishing successful stories of women and support groups, the company
plans to expand and raise awareness to the employees. Sexism is considered an
unacceptable behavior to Ericsson. The managers of the studied suborganization
already started to have collective meetings with the team to spread the
message and remind that sexism is not tolerated by the company. Following, the
company is planning recurrent meetings to plan strategies that address the
suggestions provided by the participants. In addition, Ericsson plans to raise
awareness about the solutions that already exist (and maybe women are not
aware of) and additional actions that can complement the suggestions to
mitigate the reported challenges.

##  5\. Related Work

Although diversity is a multidimensional concept that refers to the variety of
representations that exist within a group (Williams and Charles, 1998;
Albusays et al., 2021), gender (with a focus on women), is the most explored
aspect of diversity in software engineering literature (Menezes and
Prikladnicki, 2018; Silveira and Prikladnicki, 2019). The prevalence of gender
as the most studied diversity aspect can be explained by the fact that the
technology professions are known to be male dominated, despite the fact that
programming was originally seen as a female occupation (Ensmenger, 2012;
Hicks, 2017; Bjørn and Menendez-Blanco, 2019; Bjørn and Rosner, 2021).
According to a longitudinal study that evaluated 50 years of data and the
evolution of code contributions since 1970, Zacchiroli (2020) showed that
woman developers’ contributions remain low when compared to those of men.
Although the study found that men have always authored more open source code
than women, the gap has begun to narrow and women are slowly gaining space.

The biases and challenges faced by women in software development teams have
been investigated in different industry cases (Canedo et al., 2021; Wolff et
al., 2020; Musungwini et al., 2020; Orser et al., 2012). The Finish women from
Wolff et al. (2020)’s study reported lack of self-efficacy, which is a
possible predecessor of impostor syndrome, also found in our study. Also
similar to our results, the Brazilian women from Canedo et al. (2021)’s study
also reported hostile sexism, including discrimination and bias, and
benevolent sexism, when women do not receive the more complex tasks, and glass
ceiling, as only few women perform a leadership role in their team. Another
study with Brazilian women during the COVID-19 pandemic (Machado et al., 2020)
revealed that women faced even more work-life balance issues, lacking support
with housework and child care responsibilities. As opposed to the glass
ceiling reported by Canedo et al. (2021)’s study and our results, the main
challenge reported by the Zimbabwean women from (Musungwini et al., 2020)’s
study was lack of digital exposure and career guidance from young age. So far,
the studies point at generic aspects, focusing on understanding a broader,
more comprehensive picture of the challenges faced by women. In our work, we
evolve the findings by diagnosing an organization that is investing in
programs to attract and retain women.

Women who contribute to F/OSS projects have reported some of the challenges
also reported by women from the present study: work-life balance issues (Lee
and Carver, 2019), impostor syndrome (Lee and Carver, 2019; Balali et al.,
2018), lack of peer parity (Powell et al., 2010; Canedo et al., 2020), prove-
it-again (Imtiaz et al., 2019) and sexism (Singh, 2019; Calvo, 2021; Nafus,
2012). Non-inclusive communication is faced by F/OSS women in code reviews and
mailing lists (Paul et al., 2019; Balali et al., 2018; Qiu et al., 2019), and
was reported as an aspect of the hostile sexism faced by women in the present
study, which they described taking place during meetings. While in F/OSS women
face bias against contributions when they explicitly identify as women(Terrell
et al., 2017; Canedo et al., 2020), in our study we found a lack of
recognition. Stereotypes manifest the common expectations about members of
certain social groups. Both the descriptive (how women are) and prescriptive
(how women should be) gender stereotypes and the expectations they produce can
compromise a woman’s career progress (Heilman, 2001, 2012). In F/OSS projects,
women reported facing stereotyping that box them into specializations despite
their manifest protest (Vedres and Vasarhelyi, 2019) and being treated by men
as if they were their mothers, asking for advice about how to dress and behave
but refusing to enter into a technical dialogue (Nafus, 2012). While women in
our study reported also facing stereotypes, for them it was part of the
Maternity Wall and receiving fewer responsibilities because they had children.
And whereas F/OSS women reported that they faced obstacles to finding a
mentor, since upon discovering their mentee’s gender, men mentors can treat
the relationship as a dating opportunity (Nafus, 2012), this was not reported
by women from the present study.

##  6\. Threats to Validity

There are some limitations related to our research results.

Internal validity. The characteristics of our sample may have influenced our
results. Although the company has office in several locations, a great part of
the responses (42 out of 64) were from women who live in India. Thus, the
challenges and suggestions can reflect some of the specific socio-cultural
problems and aspirations for women from this country. The most prevalent
nationality of employees overall from the studied suborganization is Indian
(55%).

External Validity. The results are valid for the studied suborganization of
Ericsson and additional research is necessary to investigate the challenges
and suggestions in other contexts.

Survival bias. Our results reflect the opinion of current employees.
Therefore, to increase women’s participation by fully understanding the
reasons they might leave, we acknowledge that additional research is necessary
to understand the point of view of the women who left the company. To mitigate
this threat, we asked the participants about reasons that prompted a woman
they know to leave the company.

Recall bias. As our questions were open-ended, our results could be impacted
by either salience bias, where respondents focus on definitions that are
prominent or emotionally striking and not necessarily all the factors that
matter; or by memory bias, where participants answered questions based on what
they can first recall. However, topics that are relevant to the respondent
often emerge from the spontaneous answers.

Data Consistency. Consistency refers to ensuring that the results consistently
follow from the data and there is no inference that cannot be supported after
data analysis (Merriam and Tisdell, 2015). The group of researchers performed
the qualitative analysis of questionnaire’s responses. We had weekly meetings
to discuss and adjust codes and categories until reaching agreement. In the
meetings, we also checked the consistency of our interpretations. All analysis
was thoroughly grounded in the data collected and exhaustively discussed
amongst the whole team. The team includes researchers with extensive
experience in qualitative methods.

Theoretical saturation. A potential limitation in qualitative studies regards
reaching theoretical saturation. From participants in this study with
different backgrounds and perceptions about the studied phenomenon, we
received 64 responses for the challenges question and 70 for the strategies.
The participants were diverse in terms of experience, tenure, age, family
status. Therefore, although theoretical saturation cannot be claimed, we
believe that we obtained a consistent and comprehensive account of the
phenomenon for the studied case. After analyzing the $40^{th}$ response of
challenge and the $29^{th}$ response of suggestion we did not find any new
categories, using the existing categories for the following 24 challenges and
41 suggestions.

##  7\. Conclusion

This paper presents a case study aiming at understanding the challenges faced
by women in a large software company and collecting strategies to increase the
number of women. We found that even with the commitment with diversity and
inclusion from Ericsson, women still perceive challenges and call for changes.

We also showed that the cultural structural sexism present in society is
mirrored in the professional environment. There is still a long work ahead for
Ericsson, for the software industry, and for us, as society, to create a more
diverse and inclusive environment. We hope our results will enlighten actions
towards reducing the perceived challenges and (more importantly, maybe)
increasing awareness about the structural and cultural hurdles imposed on
women that negatively influence diversity in the software industry.

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