Understanding Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Challenges Within the Research Software Community
It addresses equity, diversity, and inclusion issues for the research software community, with incremental insights applicable to broader software development.
The paper analyzed survey data to identify a lack of diversity in the Research Software Engineer community and proposed interventions to address these challenges, highlighting areas where diversity is improving.
Research software -- specialist software used to support or undertake research -- is of huge importance to researchers. It contributes to significant advances in the wider world and requires collaboration between people with diverse skills and backgrounds. Analysis of recent survey data provides evidence for a lack of diversity in the Research Software Engineer community. We identify interventions which could address challenges in the wider research software community and highlight areas where the community is becoming more diverse. There are also lessons that are applicable, more generally, to the field of software development around recruitment from other disciplines and the importance of welcoming communities.