GE@ICSE2019

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is pervasively influencing all human activities. In this context, more and more people of any age, gender and culture is exposed to such technologies and has to acquire some ability and skill in this context.

For reasons that are still being studied, the engagement of genders with ICT is not uniform. This gap is occurring at all levels and it is evident, for instance, in the small percentage of women covering top positions in professional and academic activities in the field.

At the same time, the community is realising that diversity, when it does not assume the negative aspects of discrimination, plays a key role to a successful and competitive context for software development and research. Such diversity is not only related to gender aspects but refers also to the combination of culture, religion and geographical distribution.

In the first edition of the workshop, we started mapping the situation in different countries and different areas of research, and identifying a number of issues ranging from a lack of protagonism by female researchers to concrete cases of hostility in the working environment, to the difficultly of students to give to female professors the same value they give to male ones.

In the new edition of the workshop we plan to continue the discussion and the analysis involving other countries we could not cover last year as well as new research areas in software engineering. Also, spanning from the gender aspects we plan to expand the discussion to other aspects of diversity, including religion, disability, social and cultural differences, etc.

The workshop will include some invited speeches from experts in the areas mentioned above, the presentation of accepted position papers and open discussion sessions.

A joint publication will be planned after the end of the workshop to make the community aware of our findings.