Challenges Women in Software Engineering Leadership Roles Face:

A Qualitative Study

Karina Kohl and Rafael Prikladnicki

School of Technology, PUCRS, Porto Alegre, Brazil

Keywords:

Software Engineering, Management, Leadership, Empathy, Women, Qualitative.

Abstract:

Software engineering is not only about technical solutions. To a large extent, it is also concerned with orga-

nizational issues, project management, and human behavior. There are serious gender issues that can severely

limit the participation of women in science and engineering careers. It is claimed that women lead differently

than men and are more collaboration-oriented, communicative, and less aggressive than their male counter-

parts. However, when talking with women in technology companies’ leadership roles, a list of problems

women face grows fast. We invite women in software engineering management roles to answer the questions

from an empathy map canvas. We used thematic analysis for coding the answers and group the codes into

themes. From the analysis, we identiﬁed seven themes that support us to list the main challenges they face in

their careers.

1 INTRODUCTION

Software engineering is not only about technical so-

lutions. It is, to a large extent, also concerned with or-

ganizational issues, project management, and human

behavior (Wohlin C., 2003).

Diversity is being discussed intensively by differ-

ent knowledge areas of society, and these discussions

in Software Engineering are increasing as well. Dif-

ferent people form software development teams, and

lately, it is being discussed that we have underrep-

resented groups as, for instance, gender, ethnic, cul-

tural, and others. Page (Page, 2007) deﬁnes cogni-

tive diversity as the differences in how we interpret,

reason, and solve, how we think and, identity diver-

sity is determined by afﬁliation with a social group

as gender, culture, ethnicity, religion, sexual orienta-

tion, etc. Cognitive diversity is linked to better out-

comes in two main types of tasks: problem-solving

and prediction. Identity diversity creates collective

beneﬁts when connects to cognitive diversity and con-

nects these diverse talents to relevant problems.

Gender diversity often refers to an equitable or

fair representation of people of different genders. It

commonly refers to an equal ratio of men and women

but may also include people of non-binary genders

(Sytsma, 2006). Non-binary is a spectrum of gender

identities that are not exclusively masculine or femi-

nine, outside the gender binary (Usher, 2006).

Page (Page, 2007) says identity attributes cause us

to construct different sets of cognitive tools. Iden-

tity differences lead to experiential differences that

create tool differences. We can see this in the con-

text of gender differences. Because we treat men and

women differently, we provide them different expe-

riences. As a result, they learn to think about situa-

tions differently. The effects of identity on experience

and opportunities are hard to measure. Ideally, society

would not discriminate based on identity characteris-

tics. But even if society did not, policies that encour-

age or mandate identity blindness could not immedi-

ately overcome the residue of past biases.

Frize (Frize, 2005) says there are serious gender

issues that can severely limit women’s participation

in science and engineering careers, which are simi-

lar in many parts of the world. One main obstacle

to women’s retention or participation is that women’s

contributions and abilities are less valued than men’s,

and women are generally ignored in mainstream his-

tory. A systemic bias against women arose and was

perpetuated for thousands of years by philosophers

and thinkers. Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) writings make

his position clear: ”The female is as it were a de-

formed male. The male is by nature ﬁtter for the com-

mand than the female... The justice of a man and a

woman is not the same; the courage of a man is shown

in commanding a woman obeying. In men, qualities

or capacities are found in their perfection, whereas

Kohl, K. and Prikladnicki, R.

Challenges Women in Software Engineering Leadership Roles Face: A Qualitative Study.

DOI: 10.5220/0010413602050212

In Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS 2021) - Volume 2, pages 205-212

ISBN: 978-989-758-509-8

205

women are less balanced, more easily moved to tears,

more jealous; she is also more false of speech [and]

more deceptive.” Plato (429-347 BC), however, ar-

gued that women, like men, could rule and that those

who showed such talents ought to be given access to

education. If they are to become rulers, women must

have equal access to education and training as men

do. Plato advocated education for women so that they

could participate equally in society (Frize, 2005).

Jetter et al. (Jetter et al., 2013) mention that lead-

ership style, the ”manner and approach of providing

direction, implementing plans, and motivating peo-

ple ,” has a signiﬁcant impact on team performance

and the achievement of organizational goals. A par-

ticipative leadership style was positively related to

highly functional teams and fostered team innova-

tion. Gender is a factor that has been investigated

in leadership style studies. It is sometimes claimed

that women lead differently than men and are more

collaboration-oriented, communicative, and less ag-

gressive than their male counterparts.

Jetter and Walker (Jetter and Walker, 2017) say

it has almost become a stylized fact that, on aver-

age, women are more likely to avoid competition,

under-perform in competitive environments, and ex-

hibit higher risk aversion than men. Persistent so-

cial phenomena, such as the gender wage gap or the

under-representation of women in highly competitive

occupations and job positions, have been linked to

such observations. One prominent hypothesis to ex-

plain this phenomenon relates to the idea that the

gender of one’s opposition could inﬂuence compet-

itive behavior. More generally, people may behave

differently when competing against adversaries from

the opposite sex. If true, this would imply wide-

ranging consequences in a number of settings. For

instance, numerous work environments are character-

ized by persistent under-representation of one gen-

der. Women are especially under-represented in jobs

that are generally associated with high-pressure en-

vironments and large stakes, such as ﬁnancial man-

agement (the share of females at Wall Street remains

at approximately 10 percent) or CEO positions in the

US (2.5 percent). Other areas with low female em-

ployee shares include IT- and math-related occupa-

tions, where women usually occupy less than 20 per-

cent of positions.

Eagly and Carli (Eagly and Carli, 2003) say any

female advantage in leadership style might be offset

by disadvantage that ﬂows from prejudice and dis-

crimination directed against women as leaders. Prej-

udice consists of an unfair evaluation of a group of

people based on stereotypical judgments of the group

rather than its members’ behavior or qualiﬁcations.

When people hold stereotypes about a group, they ex-

pect that group to possess characteristics and exhibit

behavior consistent with those stereotypes. They also

say, consistent with role incongruity theory, stereo-

type research reveals that people do consider men to

be more agentic than women and women to be more

communal than men. Also, the communal qualities

that people associate with women, such as warmth

and selﬂessness, diverge from the agentic qualities,

such as assertiveness and instrumentality, that peo-

ple perceive as characteristics of successful leaders.

In contrast, the predominantly agentic qualities that

people associate with men are similar to the qualities

perceived to be needed for success in high-status oc-

cupations, including most managerial occupations.

Novielli and Serebrenik (Novielli and Serebrenik,

2019) said that the interest in the power of emotions

stimulated efforts to study the link between emotions

and developers’ productivity and understand the trig-

gers for emotions during software development and

related activities, and assess the impact of emotions

on the developers’ well-being. They say that a team

manager or the scrum master can beneﬁt from under-

standing the developers’ emotions. Such an under-

standing can, for example, inform retrospective anal-

ysis that considers emotions for identifying and cor-

recting uneven task distribution or for providing just-

in-time support to a team member stuck in dealing

with a programming task.

Considering the context of women in software en-

gineering leadership roles, we used the empathy map

canvas technique applied in the format of a survey to

understand three women’s perceptions and emotions

in different management roles in a technology com-

pany (project/product managers, people managers,

scrum masters, etc.). Our main goal is to answer the

following research question:

RQ. What are the challenges women in Soft-

ware Engineering leadership/management

roles face?

The rest of the paper proceeds as follows. Sec-

tion 2 presents background about Empathy. Section

3 summarizes the methodology we use in this study.

Section 4 presents the results we found and discus-

sions. Section 5 concludes the paper.

2 EMPATHY

Decety and Cowell (Decety and Cowell, 2014) say

empathy is the ability to share in and understand oth-

ers’ experiences vicariously. There is broad con-

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206

sensus that empathy is a fundamental component of

our social and emotional lives. Indeed, empathy has

a vital role in social interaction, including under-

standing others’ feelings and subjective psychological

states. Empathy-related processes are thought to mo-

tivate prosocial behavior (e.g., sharing, comforting,

and helping) and caring for others, inhibit aggression,

and provide the foundation for care-based morality.

Henschel et al. (Henschel et al., 2020) say em-

pathy corresponds to the ability to understand others’

minds, feel their emotions outside our own, and re-

spond with kindness, concern, and care to their emo-

tions. It is a multidimensional construct encompass-

ing an affective component (i.e., tendencies to feel

compassion and concern for others) and a cognitive

component (i.e., an ability to understand the reasons

for another person’s emotions and imagine different

viewpoints beyond one’s own).

Cameron et al. (Cameron et al., 2019) suggest em-

pathy may not be easy — in many cases, particularly

with strangers, it may require cognitive work. Em-

pathy may seem less taxing for loved ones or in en-

vironments that scaffold empathy with social rewards

and may be selected rather than suppressed. People

may set the limits of empathy based on how hard they

want to work. A study from Weisz and Zaki (”Weisz,

2018) suggests that people want to empathize with

those most relevant to them. This tendency goes be-

yond group membership; people are motivated to em-

pathize with those who look like them, those who are

kind to them, and those close to them.

Dave Gray created the empathy map technique in

2009 to help teams develop deep, shared understand-

ing and empathy for other people. People use it to im-

prove customer experience, navigate organizational

politics, design better work environments, and host

other things. The original goal of the empathy map

is to gain a deeper level of understanding of a stake-

holder in your business ecosystem, which may be a

client, prospect, partner, etc., within a given context,

such as a buying decision or an experience using a

product or service (Gray, 2017).

In Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), empathy

appears in different works as in Bennett and Ros-

ner (Bennett and Rosner, 2019) that studied empathy

around disability. Gonzales et al. (Gonz

alez-Ba

nales

and Ort

ız, 2017) used the empathy map as a tool to

analyze Human-Computer Interaction in the elderly.

Ferreira et al. (Ferreira et al., 2015) used a combina-

tion of personas and empathy maps to enhance user

experience.

In the context of Software Engineering, we opted

to use the technique experimentally in a different situ-

ation, so we used the Empathy Map Canvas technique

to collect the data through our survey. We consider it

essential to connect with the participants’ experiences

and their emotions for this sensitive subject. It was

a valid experience once two respondents mentioned

that the survey touched them, and it got them think-

ing about their professional journey.

3 THE STUDY DESIGN

Given (Given, 2008) says survey research refers to the

set of methods used to gather data systematically from

a range of individuals, organizations, or other units

of interest. Speciﬁc methods may include question-

naires (on paper or online), interviews (conducted by

any method; e.g., individual interviews done face to

face or via telephone), focus groups, or observation

(e.g., structured observations of people using internet

access stations at a public library).

This work’s data collection began when people in

Brazil were around four months in social distancing

due to the COVID-19 pandemics. The original idea

was to perform a focus group with three women in

leadership/management roles using the empathy map

canvas questions to guide the discussion. However,

the pandemics forced us to change the plans, and we

opted to adapt the empathy map canvas to an online

survey. Two were the main reasons to send the empa-

thy map to respond as a survey instead of running a

focus group using online conference call tools:

1. Schedule: the professionals’ agendas are busier

than before COVID-19. People report that they

have more meetings than usual, even after ofﬁce

hours, which leads them to exhaustion.

2. People are reporting higher sensitivity to their

emotions and difﬁculties in expressing them in a

group.

Given the situation, after a brief conversation with

the women who were going to participate in the fo-

cus groups, we opted for sending the empathy map in

an online survey format so they could respond asyn-

chronously and in the most comfortable moment for

them.

Given (Given, 2008) says the deﬁning element of

focus groups is the use of the participants’ discussion

as a form of data collection. In particular, there is no

requirement to reach a consensus or produce a deci-

sion; instead, it is the participants’ conversation about

the research topic of interest. Once, initially, the focus

group would be guided by the empathy map canvas

questions, we entirely mapped the questions as open-

questions to the online survey. Given (Given, 2008)

also says open-ended questions provide greater free-

Challenges Women in Software Engineering Leadership Roles Face: A Qualitative Study

207

Table 1: Demographics of the Participants of the Study.

Answer Age Gender

Race/

Ethnicity

Years

in IT

Years in

current job

Role

Self Evaluation

on experience

#1 34 Woman White 10 1 Scrum Master IT Manager

Specialist

(+3 years)

#2 43 Woman White 19 2

ScrumMaster

Product Owner

People Manager

Specialist

(+3 years)

#3 35 Woman White 16 2 IT Coordinator

Experienced

(1 - 3 years)

Avg 37.3 15 1.7

dom to the researcher in terms of how to frame the

question, as well as granting greater freedom to re-

spondents in the ways they choose to answer. Open-

ended questions may challenge respondents because

they are more demanding and time-consuming to an-

swer; however, the data obtained are typically richer

than that generated from closed questions. Consider-

ing this, we understood that we could lose the con-

versation between the participants, but we still would

have rich qualitative data to analyze.

Below, we list the high-level questions of the em-

pathy map as deﬁned by Dave Gray (Gray, 2017), and

we included in the survey:

1. Who we are empathizing with?

• Who is the person we want to understand?

• What is the situation they are in?

• What is their role in the situation?

• How will we know they were successful?

2. What do they need to do?

• What do they need to do differently?

• What tasks do they want or need to get done?

• What decisions do they need to make?

3. What do they see?

• What are they watching and reading?

• What kind of tasks are they exposed to daily?

• Who are their friends?

• What kind of problems they face?

4. What do they say?

• What have we heard they say?

• What can we imagine they saying?

5. What do they do?

• What do they do today?

• What behavior have we observed?

• Whats can we imagined they doing?

6. What do they hear?

• What are they hearing others saying?

• What are they hearing from friends?

• What are they hearing from colleagues?

• What do they hear second hand?

7. What do they think and feel?

• Pains: What are their fears, frustrations, and

anxieties?

• Gains: What are their wants, needs, hopes, and

dreams?

3.1 Participants

We invited three women in Software Engineering

leadership/management roles to answer our ques-

tions. They work in the same tech company in

Brazil, but they have different career paths. They

have worked for different companies and have differ-

ent work and life experiences. Table 1 presents the

demographic data of those women. We did not pro-

vide pre-ﬁlled gender and race/ethnicity lists, so re-

spondents could self-identify themselves.

3.2 Qualitative Data Analysis

Runeson and Martin (Runeson and H

ost, 2009) say

analysis of qualitative data is conducted in a series

of steps. First, the data is coded, which means that

parts of the text can be given a code representing a

certain theme, area, construct, etc. One code is usu-

ally assigned to many pieces of text, and one piece of

text can be assigned more than one code. Codes can

form a hierarchy of codes and sub-codes. The coded

material can be combined with the researcher’s com-

ments and reﬂections (i.e., ”memos”). When this has

been done, the researcher can go through the mate-

rial to identify a ﬁrst set of hypotheses. For exam-

ple, these can be phrases similar in different parts of

the material, patterns in the data, differences between

sub-groups of subjects, etc. The identiﬁed hypothe-

ses can then be used when further data collection is

conducted in the ﬁeld, i.e., resulting in an iterative

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approach where data collection and analysis is con-

ducted in parallel as described above. During the it-

erative process, a small set of generalizations can be

formulated, eventually resulting in a formalized body

of knowledge, which is the ﬁnal result of the research

attempt. This is, of course, not a simple sequence of

steps. Instead, they are executed iteratively, and they

affect each other.

We performed a thematic analysis with open cod-

ing on the responses from the empathy map. We read

and reread the data, looking for keywords, trends,

themes, or ideas to outline the analysis. This anal-

ysis identiﬁed themes across the questions from the

survey. Table 2 lists the codes, themes, and quotes.

4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

The data collected through the empathy map applied

to three software engineering managers were coded

and grouped in themes, as shown in Table 2. We

identiﬁed 23 codes then we grouped them into seven

themes. The themes helped us answer the research

question proposed for this study, and we discuss them

in this Section.

4.1 RQ. What Are the Challenges

Women in Software Engineering

Middle Management Roles Face?

Permission to Occupy Authorized Spaces. As men-

tioned at the beginning of this work, Frize (Frize,

2005) says there are serious gender issues that can

severely limit women’s participation in science and

engineering careers, and these are similar in many

parts of the world. One main obstacle to women’s re-

tention or participation is that women’s contributions

and abilities are less valued than men’s, and women

are generally ignored in mainstream history. From the

answers we collected, it is possible to see that women

want to occupy positions that men traditionally occu-

pied. However, there is also a sensation that women

can occupy those roles when ”authorized.” The po-

sitions occupied for those women are as they were

given the right to be there, and it is what they deserve.

Recognition and Equal Opportunities. The three

managers reported their desire for recognition. They

want to know that what they are doing is signiﬁcant

and acknowledge by their peers and managers. The

recognition comes together with the desire for equal

opportunities to grow in their career as their men

peers.

Need to Go Above and Beyond. The managers men-

tioned they feel like they always need to put more ef-

fort and go beyond the men’s peers. There is the sen-

sation that the same work is praised when a man does

it, and it is suspicious when a woman does. Again,

women mention the high effort to prove their work is

good or even better than their male peers’ work.

Mental Wear and Tear. The efforts for recognition

and the high energy put into achieving it leads them to

exhaustion. The managers mentioned they feel tired

because they always need to have a strong opinion and

a solution for every problem shared with them.

Drama and Stereotypes. Eagly and Carli (Eagly and

Carli, 2003) say prejudice consists of an unfair evalu-

ation of a group of people based on stereotypical judg-

ments of the group rather than the behavior or qualiﬁ-

cations of its members. When people hold stereotypes

about a group, they expect that group to possess char-

acteristics and exhibit behavior consistent with those

stereotypes. In our study, the surveyed women men-

tioned stereotypes about their physical appearance.

They said they are judged by what they wear, by the

makeup absence, and even for have opted for short

hair (”women with short hair are not women”). Also,

their mental state is always put in check. When shar-

ing concerns about keeping a healthy and psycholog-

ically safe environment, they use to hear that look for

it is an exaggeration and that they are doing ”drama.”

They also listen to things as ”this woman is crazy.”

Obstacles and Fears. The managers mentioned

structural sexism in different parts of the survey.

Sometimes they are afraid of talking about it once

their male peers or even their managers can scold

them. As a considerable obstacle, they see the broth-

erhood between men at all levels. They mentioned the

perception of the existence of ”a network of male pro-

tectionism, which prevents women from advancing to

strategic positions.”

Hire and Education for Diversity. Besides the

heavy psychological load women carry out to con-

duct their daily activities, they are still concerned

about creating psychological safety for gender diver-

sity. As hiring managers, they use the opportunity

to build more diverse and inclusive environments

in technology. With that, they try to minimize

the challenges to the next generations of women

in leadership positions. However, they report low

support from peers and higher levels.

Besides the challenges, the three managers men-

tioned that even with the small representativeness,

they believe in paving the way for more women in

technology careers. They are supported by thoughts

of doing something meaningful to other people’s lives

Challenges Women in Software Engineering Leadership Roles Face: A Qualitative Study

209

Table 2: Results of the Thematic Analysis.

Codes Theme Quotes

Authorization

Deserve

Right

Positions

Permission to Occupy

Technology Spaces

“I see in the company I work, an exact sample of the market:

women occupying “authorized spaces.” It seems that I have been

given the right to be where I am and that it is the part I deserve.”

“The deconstruction of the thought that women are not able

to occupy positions that men predominantly occupy today.”

Recognition

Opportunities

Equity

Recognition and

Equal Opportunities

“Recognition and equity in opportunities.”

“Recognition and opportunity to have more space.”

“A plural and psychologically healthy professional

environment that provides equity in career development”

Beyond

Potential

Need to Go

Above and beyond

“I often feel that I need to go beyond my peers in terms of training as if

I was never competent enough to achieve the results expected from me”

“I still see something very distant from diverse team structures.

I already see some diversity at the beginning of career. In development teams,

I don’t see a woman Specialist, for example.”

“At the beginning of my career, I always thought that when I was 40 years old,

I would be someone in a strategic area that would make a difference in a scaled way.

I know it makes a difference, but it is not a universe in scale.

I often see that my potential is not used at their maximum.”

Tiredness

Expectations

Prove

Judgement

Mental wear

and tear

“I feel tired because I want to make a difference, so

I put a lot of effort into thinking and planning before proposing something.”

I feel they expect I need to have always a position about everything.

I can not exempt myself from an opinion.”

“I would say that the biggest problem is the counteraction.

I always need to present hard proof of my suggestions and plans.”

“Frequently, mental wear and tear for performing tasks in very different contexts.”

“As a woman and mother, I need to prove myself much more.

If a man and a woman perform the same task and are successful,

the man will be praised and promoted for it,

while the woman will be criticized, and her outcome will be judged with suspicion.”

Drama

Crazy

Drama and

Stereotypes

“I also imagine many teams saying that “everything is drama.”

“Do I need to change my way of speaking and acting with that person then?”

“Women are dramatic and talk too much,”

“I don’t know how to talk about it, I prefer not to talk,”

“Women with short hair are not women,”

“That woman is crazy, “etc.

Male Protectionism

Masculinization

Sexism

Humiliation

Obstacles

and Fears

“A network of male protectionism, which prevents women from advancing

to strategic positions (or advancing with great difﬁculty, requiring

a certain masculinization for that).”

“the partnerships that count a lot at all levels. Do not be a white man.”

“Structural sexism and even to be scolded for trying to ﬁght against it.”

“To stay out of the standard behavior that companies expect from

the role that I ﬁnd myself in today (software engineering manager)

for the sake of being myself.”

“Once again humiliation”

Hiring

Diversity

Education

Make Difference

Hire and Education

for Diversity

“I carry out actions to expand the hiring of women and black people.

It is also my goal to carry out education actions with my teams”

“Once I am the only woman in management in my area, the behavior

I seek is not to follow the established pattern. I seek to bring diversity to my teams.”

“When hiring, I seek diversity and bring diversity.

I have a fortnightly meeting group with this diverse group where

we seek a supportive and safe environment. But my goal behind

this action is beyond that I want this diverse group to be the

next generation of leadership. At the base, it is challenging

to make the difference that needs to be made.”

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and changing the picture, even with small acts.

Additionally to the results, we considered using

the empathy map in this study as a valid experience.

Two respondents mentioned that the survey touched

them deeply, and it got them thinking about their pro-

fessional journey after answering.

4.2 Threats to Validity

Any empirical study is subject to several threats to

validity. This section is organized by classiﬁcation of

the threats to validity in three classes: Internal, Exter-

nal, and Construct categories (Wohlin et al., 2012).

Internal validity is the extent to which the de-

sign and conduct of the study are likely to prevent

systematic error (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). It

concerns confounding factors that can inﬂuence the

obtained results. We assumed a causal relationship

between the perceptions through the entire set of an-

swers we coded and grouped in themes and the an-

swers with what is considered challenging for the

women that answered the survey.

External validity is the extent to which the ef-

fects observed in the study are applicable outside of

the study (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007). The pre-

sented results are related to answers of three women

in roles of software engineering management work-

ing for the same company, so the results are only valid

in this context, and we cannot generalize them. How-

ever, this work does not intend to be a complete analy-

sis of women’s situation in software engineering man-

agement roles. It is only the ﬁrst step of a study using

the empathy map to collect qualitative data. An exten-

sion of this work is needed to conﬁrm our ﬁndings.

Threats to Construct validity focus on how ac-

curately the observations describe the phenomena of

interest. The coding process is subject to researcher

bias, as the process of grouping the codes in themes.

To minimize bias due to personal interpretation, the

process was reviewed by a second researcher.

5 CONCLUSION

This work does not intend to be a complete analy-

sis of women’s situation in software engineering mid-

dle management roles. We also cannot generalize

the results, and no intersectionality evaluation could

be done once the three women reported being white

women. Intersectionality is the theoretical framework

for understanding how aspects of a person’s social and

political identities (e.g., gender, sex, race, class, sex-

uality, religion, ability, physical appearance, height,

etc.) might combine to create unique modes of dis-

crimination and privilege, coined by Kimberle Cren-

shaw (Crenshaw, 1989). However, we intended to

bring some initial insights from applying the empa-

thy map technique to these women and raise aware-

ness of what impacts their careers, the challenges they

face, and show the distress they are exposed to. This

work is the initial step of a broader work where using

empirical strategies; we aimed to understand if a soft-

ware development team with greater gender diversity

performs better than a homogeneous team and which

factors may be the most impacted by this spectrum

of diversity. Data collection is happening in different

companies from the information technology industry

through surveys, interviews, and code repository anal-

ysis from other software development teams’ roles.

With that, we expect to reach a broader number of

women of different races/ethnicities, cultures, etc. So

we will be able to analyze the data from the point of

view of intersectionality.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project is partially funded by FAPERGS, project

17/2551-0001/205-4.

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