Analyzing the evolution and diversity of SBES Program Committee
This provides insights into diversity and participation challenges for the SBES community, but it is an incremental analysis of existing data.
The study analyzed diversity and participation patterns in the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) Program Committee from 1987 to 2019, finding that 80% of members were men, 11% were new members in the 2010s, and only 24% of accepted papers were authored by non-committee members.
The Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES) is one of the most important Latin American Software Engineering conferences. It was first held in 1987, and in 2019 marks its 33rd edition. Over these years, many researchers have participated in SBES, attending the conference, submitting, and reviewing papers. The researchers who participate in the Program Committee (PC) and perform the reviewers' role are fundamentally important to SBES, since their evaluations (e.g., deciding whether a paper is accepted or not) have the potential of drawing what SBES is now. Knowing that diversity is an important aspect of any group work, we wanted to understand diversity in the SBES PC community. We investigated a number of characteristics of SBES PC members, including their gender and geographic location. We also analyzed the turnover and renovation of the committee. Among the findings, we observed that although the number of participants in the SBES PC has increased over the years, most of them are men (~80%) and from the Southeast and Northeast of Brazil, with very few members from the North region. We also observed that there is a small turnover: during the 2010 decade, only 11% of new members were added to the PC. Finally, we investigated the participation of the PC members publishing papers at SBES. We observed that only 24% of the papers accepted to SBES were authored by members who were not committee members of the respective year. Moreover, committee members usually do not collaborate among themselves: a significant number of the papers are authored by the PC members and students. This paper may contribute to the SBES community, in particular, its special interest group, in understanding the needs and challenges of the PC's participants.