{"id":71067,"date":"2024-01-25T14:35:42","date_gmt":"2024-01-25T21:35:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/?p=71067"},"modified":"2024-01-26T09:59:01","modified_gmt":"2024-01-26T16:59:01","slug":"bianca-trinkenreich","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/bianca-trinkenreich\/","title":{"rendered":"Where are all the women in tech?"},"content":{"rendered":"

While working as a software development project manager in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, <\/span>Bianca Trinkenreich <\/span><\/b>was always one of few women in the room\u2014and she often wondered why. When she came to NAU as a Ph.D. student, she had the opportunity to search for answers.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich joined assistant professor <\/span>Igor Steinmacher<\/span><\/b>\u2019s Software Engineering Research Laboratory, where she investigated the hows and whys of women\u2019s underrepresentation in the field of open-source software development.\u202f<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I looked at the many types of people who were not participating in open-source software development, I found that the representation of women was especially low,\u201d Trinkenreich said. \u201cAs a woman in tech, and as a mother with a daughter, I really wanted to understand why we\u2019re not there and what we can do to encourage future generations of women to be there.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich\u2019s findings, published in a <\/span>dissertation<\/span><\/a> last spring, netted her one of the industry\u2019s most prestigious distinctions: a dissertation award from the <\/span>Association for Computing Machinery\u2019s Special Interest Group on Software Engineering<\/span><\/a>. The recent NAU graduate is the first Brazilian and the first Latin American to win the award, which is given every year to just one Ph.D. graduate worldwide.\u202f<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Bianca<\/a>
Trinkenreich, center, came to NAU to work with Igor Steinmacher, left.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Trinkenreich had never planned to study diversity and representation in software. But when she heard that Steinmacher, a fellow Brazilian whom she\u2019d met at a conference in 2015, was looking for a graduate research assistant to join a <\/span>National Science Foundation-funded research project<\/span><\/a> investigating diversity in the open-source software development sector, she jumped at the chance to apply.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I got to NAU, I said, \u2018OK, I\u2019ve never worked in this area before, but I truly believe in inclusion and I want to help make software engineering more inclusive,\u2019\u201d Trinkenreich said.\u202f<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich started with a deep dive into previous research on inequality in open-source software. She found that even when women possessed the same technical skills as men, their work was evaluated more harshly: When they submitted code anonymously, it was better received than when they submitted it with their names attached.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich believes today\u2019s unequal treatment has a lot to do with the way open-source software development began.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIn the past, it was a boys\u2019 club, a bunch of men in a garage,\u201d she said. \u201cBecause so many of the biggest software companies started this way, it created this stereotype that women cannot do the hard things, put in the long hours, be part of the hard discussions. And because so many open-source projects start outside of the large companies and aren\u2019t brought under their roofs until later, there are no HR inclusion guidelines to protect women from being excluded or treated unfairly. Sometimes a code of conduct isn’t enough.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich believes there\u2019s plenty of opportunity for open-source software communities to become more inclusive. In her dissertation, she proposed a mix of strategies to target many of the challenges faced by women in tech.\u202f<\/span><\/p>\n

One way to attract women and minorities, she wrote, is to show them in recruitment materials, advertisements and company media assets to help aspiring software engineers see themselves in the field. Another is to showcase successful women\u2019s stories across the company\u2019s websites and social media, demonstrating that the company supports and cheers on the women they employ. Yet another, she said, is to expose more young girls to coding and avoid writing off their abilities too early, lest that discourage them from pursuing tech careers.\u202f<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cStudies show that in early education, girls solve problems differently than boys,\u201d Trinkenreich said. \u201cGirls prefer to feel complete comprehension of a problem before solving it, whereas boys are more tinkerers. So it may seem to a teacher that a girl is slower to grasp a problem, but the reality is, she\u2019s taking the time to understand the problem as a whole.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Trinkenreich, now a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University, is proud to have won accolades for her dissertation, but she said she didn\u2019t do the work alone. NAU\u2019s focus on inclusive thinking deserves much of the credit: It steered her toward creating a dissertation committee made up of faculty in the computer <\/span>and<\/span><\/i> social sciences, which enriched her research.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI feel like I\u2019m giving back to women, and to all the students and professors I learned from during my time at NAU, with this dissertation,\u201d Trinkenreich said. \u201cI hope it opens people\u2019s eyes to what it means to do research on all the aspects of diversity\u2014such as age, tenure, race, ethnicity, gender identity\u2014and how important that is.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\"Northern<\/span><\/p>\n


\nJill Kimball | NAU Communications
\n(928) 523-2282 | j<\/a>ill.kimball@nau.edu<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While working as a software development project manager in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Bianca Trinkenreich was always one of few women in the room\u2014and she often wondered why. When she came to NAU as a Ph.D. student, she had the opportunity to search for answers. Trinkenreich joined assistant professor Igor Steinmacher\u2019s Software Engineering Research Laboratory,…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":95,"featured_media":71073,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-71067","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-campus-community"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71067","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/95"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71067"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71067\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71073"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/in.nau.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}