Software practitioners often discuss technical and social workplace issues, both in-person and online. One such social issue is fairness. As research on fairness in software engineering expands, it often concentrates on specific issues. This exploratory study provides discussions on Stack Exchange sites, focusing on the experiences and expectations of fairness in software engineering. We also want to identify the fairness aspects software practitioners talk about the most. For example, do they care more about fairness in income or how they are treated in the workplace?

Our investigation of fairness discussions on eight Stack Exchange sites resulted in a list of 136 posts (28 questions and 108 answers) manually curated from 4,178 candidate posts. The study reveals that the majority of fairness discussions revolve around the topic of income suggesting that many software practitioners are highly interested in matters related to their pay and how it is fairly distributed. Further, we noted that while not discussed as often, discussions on fairness in recruitment tend to receive the highest number of views and scores. Interestingly, the study shows that unfairness experiences extend beyond the protected attributes, with gender mainly being discussed.