Confidence in Programming Skills: Gender Insights From StackOverflow Developers Survey

Diversity is being intensively discussed by different knowledge areas of society and discussions in Software Engineering, are increasing as well. There are unconscious bias and lack of representativeness and when we talk about characteristics as ethnicity and gender, to mention a few. Studies say that diversity builds better teams and delivers better results, among other benefits. StackOverflow is a popular community question & answer forum, with a high engagement of software developers. Yearly, they apply a survey, present straightforward results, and made the anonymized results available for download, so it is possible to perform additional analysis beyond the original ones. Using data visualization techniques, we analyzed 2018 data to extract some insights about how genders see their confidence in programming skills. Results show that respondents from under-represented groups tend to believe they are not as good as their peers. From that, we propose a discussion about the unconscious bias, stereotypes, and impostor syndrome and how to provide support on that.