Diversity with respect to ethnicity and gender has been studied in
open-source and industrial settings for software development. Publication
avenues such as academic conferences and journals contribute to the growing
technology industry. However, there have been very few diversity-related
studies conducted in the context of academia. In this paper, we study the
ethnic, gender, and geographical diversity of the authors published in Software
Engineering conferences and journals. We provide a systematic quantitative
analysis of the diversity of publications and organizing and program committees
of three top conferences and two top journals in Software Engineering, which
indicates the existence of bias and entry barriers towards authors and
committee members belonging to certain ethnicities, gender, and/or geographical
locations in Software Engineering conferences and journal publications. For our
study, we analyse publication (accepted authors) and committee data (Program
and Organizing committee/ Journal Editorial Board) from the conferences ICSE,
FSE, and ASE and the journals IEEE TSE and ACM TOSEM from 2010 to 2022. The
analysis of the data shows that across participants and committee members,
there are some communities that are consistently significantly lower in
representation, for example, publications from countries in Africa, South
America, and Oceania. However, a correlation study between the diversity of the
committees and the participants did not yield any conclusive evidence.
Furthermore, there is no conclusive evidence that papers with White authors or
male authors were more likely to be cited. Finally, we see an improvement in
the ethnic diversity of the authors over the years 2010-2022 but not in gender
or geographical diversity.Comment: 13 pages, 10 figures, 4 table