Tech Talk Tuesday: How Can You Design Inclusive Software Products?

Do you value diversity, equity, and inclusion in your company? If so, are the products that you are creating equitable and inclusive for usage by diverse populations of users? The evidence suggests “no” — and in this talk, we will consider how to address this problem by answering the following questions: How can you assess whether the products you create support diverse users? And if not, how can you fix them? We will present an evaluation method, GenderMag, that you can use to find “inclusivity bugs” in your software. In this talk, we also present how different software teams have been using GenderMag and their results.

Anita Sarma is an associate professor at Oregon State University. Before this, she was an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln; a post-doctoral scholar at Carnegie Mellon University, and a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine. Through this journey, her passion has been on helping humans make better software and work together. Sarma’s research crosscuts software engineering and human-computer interaction and focuses on how software can be designed to support developers and end-user programmers in their development efforts. Her work explores how socio-technical dependencies affect teamwork, how open source can be made more inclusive, and usable security. Overall, Sarma’s research has resulted in 84 peer-reviewed publications (68 conferences, 16 journals). Her work has been funded through NSF and Air Force (AFOSR). She has been the recipient of the NSF CAREER award.