According to Forbes, eight of the top ten digital companies are from the U.S., which demonstrates the country’s technological advancements. Yet, one does not need to be a rocket scientist to notice something amiss with the U.S. software engineering workforce. Women account for just 23% of the U.S. software engineering workforce, and the figures are no better when assessing the computer and information sciences bachelor’s degrees in the U.S., where the same proportion of 23% goes to women. Rather than importing the workforce, there is an urgent need to engage women in software engineering careers, but what do we do to make it happen, and what are we doing wrong? This paper presents a critical perspective with pointers to current issues in software engineering education. It illustrates innovative perspectives that educators could employ to transform the education environment into a more women-friendly. Narrowing gender equality in a traditionally male-dominant field like software engineering would lead to female workforce development and economic rewards, with 51% of the population more actively included in the field.

Tomas Cerny is an Associate Professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona, Tucson. After earning Engineering and Masters’s degrees from the Czech Technical University, FEE, and from Baylor University, he has served as an Assistant professor at the Science and Computer Department at the Czech Technical University, FEE since 2009. Soon after earning a Doctoral degree in 2016, he returned to Baylor University to join the Computer Science department. He was tenured in 2023 at Baylor and moved as Associate Professor of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona.

His research focus is Software Engineering, Static Analysis, Cloud Computing Applications nd Architecture Degradation. He served 15+ years as the lead developer of the International Collegiate Programming Contest Management System. He authored nearly 200 publications, mostly relating to code analysis and aspect-oriented programming. Among his awards are the seven best papers, the 2023 Baylor Scholarship Award, the Outstanding Service Award ACM SIGAPP 2018 and 2015, and the 2011 ICPC Joseph S. DeBlasi Outstanding Contribution Award. He actively serves the scientific community and was on the organizing committee for IEEE SOSE, ESOCC, SANER, ACM SAC, ACM RACS, and ICITCS.