11institutetext: Software Sustainability Institute & EPCC, University of
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, U.K.
11email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
22institutetext: Department of Computing, Imperial College London, London,
U.K.
22email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
33institutetext: Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester,
Manchester, U.K.
33email<EMAIL_ADDRESS>

# Understanding Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Challenges Within the Research
Software Community

Neil P. Chue Hong1 Jeremy Cohen2 Caroline Jay3 Neil P. Chue Hong 11
0000-0002-8876-7606 Jeremy Cohen 22 0000-0003-4312-2537 Caroline Jay 33
0000-0002-6080-1382

(1University of Edinburgh
2Imperial College London
3University of Manchester

)

###### Abstract

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.

###### Keywords:

research software, software engineering, research software engineering,
diversity, EDI.

##  1 Introduction

Developing specialist research software to support computational science is an
especially challenging process. Unlike more traditional software engineering
tasks, researchers or, increasingly, RSEs (Research Software Engineers) who
write this software need an understanding of the underlying scientific
challenge being addressed.

The methods used in research favour a hypothesis-driven approach. This creates
a different working environment from the wider software engineering industry,
where software is built to meet a client’s specification. As noted by Hettrick
et al.,

> “To be effective, software development in research should be approached, not
> as a one-off transaction, but as a partnership between researcher and
> software expert.” [3]

The “partnership between researcher and software expert” mentioned here
highlights a need for varied skills and good communication. It is clear that
much computational research requires diversity of skills and experience,
working in partnership, that spans software engineering and science.
Researchers are more likely to be working with others who have different
technical expertise, use different technical terminology, and may be
communicating in a tertiary language.

Diversity in project teams, and workplaces in general, is important and it is
widely accepted that there are many benefits from ensuring diversity within
teams and communities. For example, there is evidence to show that diversity
in terms of knowledge or skills can be beneficial [19] and that gender
diversity within groups can result in higher quality scientific outputs [4].
However, there are cases where diversity can raise challenges, for example
with reduced feelings of well-being amongst members in highly-diverse teams
[31]. Diversity in the context of teams in industry and research is an area
that has been the subject of extensive research and there are some
contradictory results from the many studies undertaken. Stahl et al. [26] look
at a number of different studies of cultural diversity concluding that there
are both benefits and drawbacks. Whether benefits can be realised while
minimising more challenging aspects will depend on effective process
management. In the context of software engineering, Capretz & Ahmed [5] looked
at how different personality traits relate to suitability for different roles
in software projects. Ultimately they conclude that diversity in terms of
personalities and skills is important in helping with problem solving tasks
involved in building and maintaining software.

The different types of diversity highlighted so far, including diversity of
skills and knowledge, culture, personality and gender are, of course, just
some of the many different aspects that lead to diversity amongst a group of
individuals. Others, among a huge range, include ethnicity, disability and
age.

Research Software Engineers are, at present, much more likely to come from a
research background than software engineering professionals working in other
fields. Nonetheless, we know from surveys within the RSE community that a
similar diversity crisis to that identified in other fields exists. In this
paper, we examine current problems with diversity in research software
engineering and consider potential causes. Our aim is to present a better
understanding of existing diversity within the RSE community in order to
develop insights and recommendations to address current issues. We achieve
this through an empirical analysis of existing open data collected and made
available through large-scale international surveys of research software
engineers undertaken by the RSE community. We also review related work from
allied areas which suggests ways of addressing the challenges identified.

As pointed out by Mathieson in [20], based on 2018 ONS data, just one in eight
of almost 340,000 software development professionals in the UK are women. This
example demonstrates that there is a long way to go to address the lack of
diversity in the wider software engineering domain, as well as the more
focused domain of research software engineers. Professional software engineers
can gain their skills through a variety of different routes and they may come
from a wide range of different disciplines. For example, they may have
developed their skills through a degree programme or vocational training in
computing or a related area. Alternatively, they may come from a completely
different disciplinary background and have re-trained through one of a large
number of “coding schools” that offer training, often via intensive courses,
in software development skills. The wide array of routes into the field
creates an expectation of a diverse field which makes it all the more
surprising that this is not the case.

We highlight three core contributions this paper provides to understanding the
importance of diversity among RSEs working in computational and data science:

  * •

Providing an evidence-based analysis that demonstrates the current problems
with diversity in the research software engineering community.

  * •

Demonstrating that there is already extensive “domain mobility” for RSEs and
that a lack of such mobility is therefore not likely to be a cause for a lack
of diversity within the field.

  * •

Offering four general recommendations that we believe can form a basis to
support addressing the lack of diversity in research software engineering.

In Section 2 we examine the International RSE Survey results from 2018 and
undertake further analysis on this data. Section 3 highlights the three areas
that we see as both helping to explain and provide the basis for addressing
the lack of diversity amongst RSEs, while discussion and conclusions are
provided in Section 4.

##  2 Surveying RSE Diversity

To understand the diversity challenges facing those embarking on careers as
Research Software Engineers, we require a better understanding of the
landscape as a whole. The Software Sustainability Institute coordinates an
ongoing series of surveys of the RSE community. In the most recent survey
[24], from 2018, participants were asked a number of socio-demographic
questions.

Percentage of UK who are: |  RSEs[24] |  Academics[15] |  Software Developers[25] |  All UK workers[25]
---|---|---|---|---
Gender (female) |  14 |  46 |  14 |  48
Ethnicity (BAME/Mixed) |  5 |  15 |  21 |  12
Report disability |  6 |  4 |  10 |  13
Table 1: Comparison of 2018 demographics for Research Software Engineers,
Academics, Software Developers and general working population in the United
Kingdom.

Our reanalysis primarily focuses on UK data, as this is where the authors are
located, but the numbers from other countries in the survey are broadly
similar. Table 1 compares RSEs with UK Higher Education Statistics Authority
(HESA) data [15], and a study by the British Computer Society (BCS) of
software development professionals in the UK [25] based on 2018 Office for
National Statistics data. Limitations in the RSE data currently available to
us mean that we focus on aspects of gender, ethnicity and disability, as
opposed to other types of diversity.

This comparison indicates a gender diversity gap, which we might expect given
the percentage of women working as software developers is also 14%. But this
could be better: software is a fundamental part of all research, and 46% of
academic staff are female. The ethnicity data indicates a greater problem. Of
the respondents who declared their ethnicity, there were only 6 non-white and
5 mixed race RSEs – 5%. These figures are significantly lower than the 28%
BAME students studying computer science [30] and 10% of BAME physicists [17].
Although we should not aggregate non-white ethnic categories together, as they
will experience different challenges and biases, it is striking that RSEs do
not fit the general profile of those working in the IT industry, where there
is greater ethnic diversity.

Figure 1:  Flow of UK RSEs from academic discipline studied to domains they
now work in, categorised by gender: 79.8% male (green) / 14.3% female (purple)
/ 5.9% other responses (grey). N=203.

An important area of research is understanding if diversity can be improved if
RSEs are drawn from a wider set of degree backgrounds. Figure 1 shows where
RSEs are working based on their academic degree. Only gender diversity was
considered, given the low ethnic diversity and number of respondents reporting
a disability. Gender balance is relatively uniform across fields rather than
mirroring the gender balance in that field. Over half of RSEs have a first
degree in Physics and Astronomy or Computer Science. In the UK, 17% of CS
undergraduates were female compared with 41% of physical sciences
undergraduates [16], suggesting that RSEs come from the “computational” subset
of a subject. However, within computer science research within the UK just
under 23% of academics and researchers are female [14]. This perhaps suggests
that a larger percentage of female CS undergraduates move on to a research or
faculty position in CS than male undergraduates, or that female CS researchers
are moving into the field after undergraduate studies in other areas. However,
it could also be attributed to other factors such as industry hiring trends.
Of interest here is that, while over half of RSEs have a Physics and Astronomy
or Computer Science-focused first degree, the percentage of female RSEs is
still somewhat below the percentage of female CS research/faculty staff.

The areas that RSEs support are more widespread than the fields they are
currently recruited from. There are teams offering general RSE support at a
number of institutions and many RSEs working in the biosciences, geosciences,
and medicine. This suggests that a challenge research software engineering has
is encouraging more people with first degrees in these areas (which have more
balanced gender representation) to become RSEs. This is important because
domain knowledge can be especially valuable when undertaking RSE projects.
Things to consider include the wording of job adverts, which can affect who
applies for them [1] — can we encourage more candidates from other
disciplines? There may be lessons for the software development field more
generally — there are a significant number of RSEs whose background is in
biological sciences or geosciences, as well as some from social sciences and
the humanities, showing people with “non-traditional” degree backgrounds seek
careers as software practitioners.

One encouraging aspect of Figure 1 is there appear to be many lines going from
one discipline on the left hand side to a different discipline on the right
hand side, representing an RSE working in an area different from the one where
they trained. This suggests that there is scope to improve diversity within
the RSE community through attracting individuals from more diverse domains
into the RSE space. This provides an opportunity for more immediate
improvements in the diversity of the RSE community than the multi-year
timeline that we might expect for efforts to improve diversity amongst
undergraduate cohorts. To investigate this movement between domains, which we
call _“domain mobility”_ , we undertook further analysis of the most recent
2018 RSE survey data.

Discipline |  N |  Partially mobile (%) |  Fully mobile (%)
---|---|---|---
Biological Sciences |  95 |  44.21 |  8.42
Chemistry |  22 |  40.91 |  22.73
Computer Science |  241 |  51.45 |  22.41
Electrical & Electronic Engineering |  36 |  41.67 |  38.89
Geography & Environmental Sciences |  46 |  52.17 |  6.52
Mathematics |  69 |  47.83 |  47.83
Physics and Astronomy |  261 |  31.80 |  19.92
Table 2: Example of domain mobility across a selection of disciplines from the
2018 RSE survey data where N$>$20.

Table 2 shows an example of “domain mobility” for a series of domains where
the number of survey respondents was $>$ 20\. We define _partial mobility_ as
RSEs working in one or more domains outside the domain of their highest
degree, while also still undertaking work in the domain of their degree. _Full
mobility_ applies a further filter to partial mobility by excluding RSEs who
still work in the domain of their highest degree. So, in the case of
Mathematics, where the figures for partial and full mobility are the same,
none of the survey respondents who said their highest degree was in
Mathematics undertake RSE work in the domain of Mathematics. It should be
noted that while domain mobility is a positive concept, and the ability to
work across a wide variety of different domains is a great benefit, we do not
have any data on the reasons for these movements between domains. The
movements may be individuals wanting to undertake RSE work in, and learn
about, a different domain to their original area of study. However, there are
also likely to be cases of movement between domains being made out of
necessity due to a lack of job opportunities in an individual’s domain of
choice, for example.

###  2.1 Code and Data Availability

The Jupyter Notebooks used to perform the analysis are available from [8].
International RSE data can be obtained from [24], apart from some gender data
which have not been publicly published at the time of writing.

##  3 Improving EDI in the research software community

In this section we investigate three areas that represent both challenges and
opportunities for improving equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) within the
research software community. Through the material in this section, we hope to
highlight possible reasons for the lack of diversity in the research software
space while also providing some thoughts and guidance on how these can be
addressed and how the community can work together to help improve a wide range
of aspects of diversity. The material here is aimed at both developers of
research software, and at team leaders, technical managers and individuals in
other management and community leadership roles. For individuals who write
software, we aim to offer thoughts and advice that can help improve
understanding of the benefits of diversity and recognise situations that can
contribute to a lack of diversity. For managers and team leaders, we hope to
improve recognition of opportunities to address diversity challenges, both
locally within teams and in the wider community in the context of events and
activities.

###  3.1 Safety in similarity?

Diversity, whether in terms of gender, ethnicity, skills or other
characteristics, is important in bringing different perspectives, ideas and
experiences to a community. Diverse teams can lead to higher quality science
[4] and improved technology business performance [22].

However, as highlighted by Merritt [21] in the context of hiring staff,
individuals want to work with people who are like them and Lang & Liu [19]
point out contradictory evidence for the benefits of diversity within teams.
They highlight work by Byrne in the 1971 book “The Attraction Paradigm” that
suggests certain similarities within teams can be helpful in ensuring
effective working environments. However, they do also highlight a series of
other work that supports the idea of diversity within teams and groups being
beneficial. Van der Zee, et al. [31] highlight previous work that suggests
that we tend to have a positive response to similarity while the opposite is
true for dissimilarity. They also point out other previous work suggesting
that we have an attraction to people who share similar attitudes and values to
our own since this makes communication with them easier.

A very large study of over 20 years of scientific papers [12] shows that paper
co-authors are more likely to be of similar ethnicity. However, where papers
are the result of collaborations between authors at different locations, it
was shown that this can result in them being published in journals with high
impact factors and receiving more citations.

The above examples demonstrate that there is a perceived “safety” in being
around people who have similar interests, backgrounds and/or values. We see
that this is likely to work both ways and that in the case of a community,
such as the RSE community or groups of software practitioners more generally,
individuals choose whether or not to engage partly based on whether they see
people like themselves within that community. Of course, while individuals may
seek out others who they feel are similar or who they have things in common
with, diversity can be extremely important and hugely valuable in providing
different views, ideas, attitudes and perspectives. Ultimately this can lead
to important benefits, even if there may be learning experiences to be had
along the way. These include, for example, getting more used to working with
people who may not look at every opportunity, challenge or research problem in
the same way. Many of us will have had experiences that support this when
attending community events and workshops which often involve breakout group
discussions or problem-solving tasks.

Awareness is an important step here and this begins with educating team
leaders, community managers and event organisers to be more aware of
situations where there is a lack of diversity and the benefits of addressing
this. Developing a stronger understanding of the benefits of diversity, but
also the challenges that can arise in ensuring that diverse groups can
collaborate effectively, is an important step towards addressing the lack of
diversity in the scientific software community. This is especially important
for individuals in leadership or organisational roles. Various guides, for
example the Hopper Conference Diversity Guide [28] and NumFOCUS DISCOVER
Cookbook [23], provide detailed information on approaches for helping to
ensure diversity at conferences and events. There is also a role for RSE group
leaders in encouraging and enabling the RSEs in their teams to collaborate
with other institutions, as this diversity might lead to higher impact of
their work.

###  3.2 Increasing equity, diversity and inclusion at events

The events that we consider in this section include everything from large
conferences and workshops to small local community events with only a small
number of attendees. Large events often have dedicated organising teams and
potentially co-chairs specifically dedicated to areas such as EDI. This is
unlikely to be the case for a small community event with perhaps only a few
10s of participants. Nonetheless, being able to widen participation at events
requires you to start with an understanding of the community the event is
targeted at and an awareness of the particular aspects of diversity that you
aim to improve [9]. One suggestion for improving equity and inclusion at
conferences, from work looking at 30 conferences in the conservation and
ecology domain, is to write up and promote details of the actions and
processes followed to support improving EDI [29]. This work demonstrates that
concerns around ensuring diversity at conferences and events are not specific
to the research software community. The sort of open approach espoused through
supporting and promoting EDI activities could be beneficial across many, if
not all, domains. It would help to offer a demonstration of a conference’s
efforts to support aspects of EDI and also provide evidence for the wider
community to help identify what works and what is less successful. This should
help to avoid repeating less successful approaches to addressing diversity and
inclusion concerns across different domains.

Ensuring that event committees, speakers and panel members reflect the
diversity that organisers would like to see among an event’s attendees has
been effective in some fields. This builds on some of the ideas highlighted in
Section 3.1. Research that looked at presenters across 21 meetings of the
American Association of Physical Anthropologists found events that had either
female, or both female and male organisers, resulted in a much higher
percentage of women as first authors of presented papers and posters [18].
However a study by Bano and Zowghi of six software engineering conference
series [2] found that having a female conference chair or program committee
chair did not significantly affect the number of keynote speakers that were
female, or the make up of the program committee. This work did not, however,
look at all conference speakers.

While the figures shown in Section 2 show a lack of diversity within the RSE
community, there is a perception, when attending RSE workshops and events, of
gender and ethnic diversity being significantly better than the headline
survey figures suggest. RSE events generally have a significant number of
female speakers, workshop organisers and community leaders. We see with the
Collaborations Workshop series, an event that focuses on general research
software practice, a positive change in the diversity balance. It has had a
policy of ensuring diversity of keynote speakers, and in 2020, 55% of steering
committee members were female, 42% of all speakers were female, 34% of
attendees reported their gender as female, and 20% of attendees reported their
ethnicity as non-white or mixed.

Nonetheless, the challenge remains of attracting more individuals from a wider
range of backgrounds to get involved with RSE. A concrete action that can be
taken here is to work to increase the diversity amongst organisers, speakers
and sponsors at RSE events and be more open about the approaches taken to
support this. The latter part of this recommendation should help organisers of
other events, both within the research software community and beyond, to learn
from and build on efforts to improve EDI. Ultimately this should help to
accelerate the process of improving diversity throughout the research
community.

###  3.3 An inclusive culture and safe space

An inclusive culture is an important foundation of diversity [6]. Research
teams that include RSEs frequently have only one or two individuals in RSE
roles. Having valuable but different skills, and different career aims, can
make RSEs feel like the “odd one out” within a research group or team. As a
result, RSE communities of practice have developed in recent years to support
individuals in this field. Possibly due to previous perceived marginalisation,
they tend to be open, welcoming communities. These communities provide a great
opportunity to meet, network and collaborate with others who understand the
challenges RSEs face in their day-to-day work.

At conferences and events, one way of formally promoting inclusion is having a
clear and well-publicised _Code of Conduct_. The importance of a Code of
Conduct and the challenges it can help to address and provide guidance on are
highlighted in [10]. While still not commonplace at traditional academic
conferences [11], it is unusual to find an RSE conference or workshop that
does not have a Code of Conduct – learning from the experience of the open
source community. To ensure best practice and clarity of the message provided,
many events choose to build on widely accepted, open codes of conduct such as
the template provided by the Geek Feminism wiki [13], and also have a
diversity statement.

In the context of workplaces and research teams, it is also important that
individuals feel that they fit in, both within the workplace environment
itself and with the people based there. Cheryan et al. [7] call this “ambient
belonging”. They undertook a series of studies within a computer science
context looking at gender-based perspectives on the influence of different
environments. This work showed that environments that had aspects that made
them fit with computer science stereotypes reduced the interest of women
participating in the field. Changing the environments to make them appear less
like something that would be associated with computer science increased
interest in the field. This provides an example of the sort of potentially
small, but nonetheless significant, changes that can help to develop an
inclusive culture, a welcoming environment and, ultimately, help to improve
diversity. We consider that there may also be opportunities to help improve
other aspects of diversity through identifying and making similarly small
environmental or organisational changes in different contexts, for example to
improve the experience for people with disabilities.

The wide ranging use of codes of conduct at research software events and the
recognition of the importance of communities in helping to provide individuals
with a place where they fit in is significant. It suggests that the research
software community is developing events that are explicit in their desire to
be open and diverse, with clear statements on acceptable behaviour. We see
that progress is being made in developing an inclusive culture and providing
environments through events and activities that potential participants feel
are open and welcoming. It is of vital importance that this continues. There
are two concrete recommendations from this analysis. Firstly, within RSE
groups, both team leaders and members should be aware of the importance of
their working environment and how potentially small environmental changes may
affect other team members’ feelings of inclusion and belonging. Secondly, in
the context of community events and activities, event organisers should look
to highlight their support for diversity and inclusion through the use of a
diversity statement and provide a clear code of conduct highlighting
acceptable behaviour.

The Software Sustainability Institute runs a fellowship programme recognising
the diverse roles and skills of those working to promote research software
practice. An evaluation of the programme showed it plays an important role in
supporting communities of best practice and skills transfer, and that a
significant benefit is the way it has raised the profile of software in
research, and those people who develop and advocate for it [27]. This has had
positive effects for those who may previously have considered themselves as
‘outsiders’ in the role, or lacked confidence. This is exemplified by a
comment from a female respondent:

> “Despite getting a PhD partially from a computer science programme, I could
> see that my skills and knowledge were always at least to some extent
> dismissed or doubted […] since being elected a SSI fellow I most definitely
> observed a significant drop in mansplaining… I have little doubt that the
> SSI fellowship was a significant [reason] I got my current position as (Head
> of Division at a Supercomputing Center).” [27]

##  4 Discussion and Conclusions

Our research has shown that the gender diversity of RSEs is similar to the
field of software engineering, but does not reflect the gender balance of the
academic research workplace. This is particularly true where RSEs are working
in domains such as the biosciences, geosciences and medicine. Ethnic diversity
among RSEs is worse than in the wider software industry, but it is unclear
why. The number of RSEs with disabilities reflects the academic research
workplace, and is poor in comparison to the IT profession. Given that 19% of
the UK working age population report a disability, there is much to be done to
provide a equitable workplace for RSEs with disabilities. Differences in
workplace culture, environment or incentives may be factors, and further
research is required. However, general interventions to improve diversity
appear to be increasing gender and ethnic diversity at events.

We have highlighted the importance of communication and collaboration between
individuals building software to support research and the computational
scientists and researchers that they collaborate with. We have also shown that
diversity among all parties in these collaborations can lead to better
communication, a wider range of ideas and perspectives, and, ultimately more
effective collaborations that produce higher quality outputs. The three areas
discussed in Section 3 as key opportunities for improving equity, diversity
and inclusion within the field of research software can be summarised as
follows:

  * •

Safety in similarity? The perceived safety of looking to collaborate and work
with individuals who have similar interests, backgrounds or values is widely
recognised. While there is research that suggests there can be benefits to
this approach, there is also extensive work highlighting the benefits of
diversity. However, this is something that can be approached from two
different perspectives and individuals may be more likely to join and engage
with a community if they see people like themselves within that community.

  * •

Increasing diversity at events: It is important to highlight and promote
actions being take to improve EDI in the context of events. It is also
important to ensure that both organising groups and speakers reflect the level
of diversity that an event’s organisers would like to see among its
participants.

  * •

An inclusive culture and safe space: This is a very important aspect of both
participating in a community, and being part of an RSE group, for everyone
involved. A well-publicised Code of Conduct and diversity statement with
clearly defined processes supporting them are key elements in helping to
ensure this within the context of events. In RSE groups, leaders and team
members need to be aware of the importance of an inclusive culture and working
environment.

Poor diversity in the community of research software developers is likely a
result of the low levels of diversity in the disciplines that currently form
the major path towards an RSE role or career. We have identified scope to
widen the range of areas from which RSEs are recruited and it is hoped that
this can be achieved by better use of language in the way that RSE roles are
advertised and in the way that RSE is promoted, more generally. This may also
have relevance for professional software practitioners looking to get involved
in the research community, as it is clear that there are many people with
“non-traditional” degrees seeking careers developing software. There is a role
for professional bodies, such as the British Computer Society, Association for
Computing Machinery and IEEE Computer Society, to support and embrace these
career paths and help improve the gender diversity at undergraduate and
postgraduate level.

Nonetheless, we feel that despite the knowledge gained from our extended
analysis of existing survey data, and the pre-existing material that we have
referenced, this is a hugely complex but very important area. It would benefit
extensively from additional evidence that could be gathered through a range of
further empirical studies. Some of the areas that may be considered most
important for such studies in the short term include:

  * •

Exploring why levels of diversity among RSEs are lower than in many of the
areas of study and research that already feed into RSE careers, such as
Computer Science and Physics and Astronomy. What are the levels of diversity
in other career paths for these subjects? What influences the career choices
that individuals make and are there specific aspects that steer them away from
an RSE career?

  * •

Trialing approaches for increasing diversity and inclusion at events,
including workshops and conferences. Gathering statistics on the relative
success of these approaches and their contribution to improving diversity
within the computational science developer community.

  * •

Looking at opportunities to further increase “domain mobility” through taking
advantage of existing courses/training material or offering new information
that can help individuals move more practically between working in different
domains. Look at take-up of such opportunities across different domains and
use this as a basis for longer-term analysis on how diversity in the RSE
community changes over time.

Once individuals become RSEs and engage with the RSE community, the RSE
community meets many of the requirements to ensure that it welcomes and
supports diversity. The open, inclusive, nature of the community is of great
importance here and, using gender diversity as an example, there are already
several women in highly-visible leadership roles.

Developing software for science and the wider computational research domain is
challenging. The relatively new field of research software engineering
encompasses many of the individuals undertaking these software development
tasks, regardless of whether their official job title considers them to be a
researcher, professor, software engineer or RSE. It is clear that research
software engineering, and research software in general, shares many diversity
challenges with the wider software development field but we feel there are
many opportunities to address this. This begins with increasing awareness of
the different aspects raised in this paper and using this as a basis to
develop the environment and opportunities to help build equity, diversity and
inclusion within the community. We hope that the research software community
continues to grow, and become more diverse by sharing and learning from other
practitioners.

##  5 Acknowledgement

We thank Simon Hettrick, James Graham and Rob Haines for their input, and
Olivier Philippe who originally processed the international RSE survey data.
NCH and CJ acknowledge support from EPSRC / BBSRC / ESRC / NERC / AHRC / STFC
/ MRC grant EP/S021779/1 for the UK Software Sustainability Institute. JC
acknowledges support from EPSRC grant EP/R025460/1.

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