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Andean indigenous in digital society must be more than software users
How did Andean indigenous people made the jump from a group that is woefully underrepresented in software industry to professionals in that same field?
A digital society can connect people, communities and things to the internet like never before. In fact, digital technology runs like a backbone in our society, and in turn, software is part of any digital technology.
With an increasing demand of software in our society, a shortage of software engineers and developers have emphasized the absence of women and other underrepresented minorities such as Black, Latin American and Indigenous people.
In addition, homogenous teams, with similar worldviews, have overlooked or exacerbated design flaws for a part of society that are underrepresented on their teams, for example, indigenous communities. Therefore, software development teams should be more diverse.
In this study, we focus on the factors influencing Software Engineering career choice of Andean indigenous. Despite that there are theoretical approaches to explain and predict general and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) career choices, person-centered analysis through qualitative approaches is still necessary to identify the factors that shape career choice of underrepresented minorities. The findings reveal seven factors: social support, exposure to digital technology, autonomy of use, purpose of use, digital skill, identity, and work ethic.
A diverse workforce is not just 'nice to have'. Beyond the economic standpoint (shortages of professionals), a social perspective sheds light on root cause of diversity crisis in software industry and the issues of bias in the software it builds, 'issues of discrimination'. Therefore, software, digital technology, and our digital society at large should not reproduce bias and should not replicate and/or amplify existing structures of inequality in society.
Reference:
Mary Sánchez-Gordón and Ricardo Colomo-Palacios: Factors influencing Software Engineering Career Choice of Andean Indigenous. ACM Digital Library, 2020. (Summary)
This article/press release is paid for and presented by Østfold University College
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