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Toward Awareness Creation of Common Challenges Women are Facing in Academia: A Study from a German Perspective

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Software Architecture (ECSA 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13365))

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Abstract

Every day, women face plenty of challenges regarding their family, taking care of the seniors, equality, and appreciation at the workplace, etc. - usually with little outside support. While these challenges are not new, the awareness level towards these challenges is still low. This research aims to create awareness towards women’s difficulties by studying the challenges women in research face at German universities. We also investigate how women in research handle their challenges and whether these challenges correlate to their place of birth. We investigate how these challenges differ between the computer science community and other STEM fields. To gain data, we conducted a survey with 200 women from technical universities in Germany. The results show that parenting and family planning are the most common challenges among women in research. Many women also describe problems dealing with men. Furthermore, women in computer science solved their problems in 34% of cases, others only in 23%. Even if help from others was the most frequently described solution (29%), strategies like a workaround (27%) or changing the workplace (11%) are common. We conclude from our study, that women in research still have many problems. These problems include finding an appropriate solution to a problem.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.limesurvey.org/.

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Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Competence Center for Applied Security Technology (KASTEL Projects 46.23.01 and 46.23.02). Larissa Schmid was supported by the Ministry of Science, Research and the Arts Baden-Württemberg (Az: 7712.14-0821-2).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. KASTEL – Institute of Information Security and Dependability, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Sophie Corallo, Manar Mazkatli, Hamideh Hajiabadi, Angelika Kaplan, Larissa Schmid & Snigdha Singh

  2. FZI Research Center for Information Technology, Karlsruhe, Germany

    Martina Rapp

  3. Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

    Romina Kuehn

Authors
  1. Sophie Corallo
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  2. Manar Mazkatli
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  3. Martina Rapp
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  4. Hamideh Hajiabadi
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  5. Angelika Kaplan
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  6. Romina Kuehn
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  7. Larissa Schmid
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  8. Snigdha Singh
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sophie Corallo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Università di Bergamo, Dalmine, Italy

    Patrizia Scandurra

  2. University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

    Matthias Galster

  3. Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Raffaela Mirandola

  4. KU Leuven, Kortrijk, Belgium

    Danny Weyns

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Corallo, S. et al. (2022). Toward Awareness Creation of Common Challenges Women are Facing in Academia: A Study from a German Perspective. In: Scandurra, P., Galster, M., Mirandola, R., Weyns, D. (eds) Software Architecture. ECSA 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13365. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-15116-3_3

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-15115-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-15116-3

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