Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis, and what can we do? - Neil Chue Hong

This resource first appeared in issue #43 on 25 Sep 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Diversity

Does Research Software Engineering have a diversity crisis, and what can we do? - Neil Chue Hong

This is a talk that Neil Chue Hong gave at the 2020 International RSE Leaders Workshop. The numbers he gave are UK based - he’s with the Software Sustainability Institute in the UK - but they’re pretty grim. UK research software developers (RSEs) have as low or lower percentages of people who identify as women or are black, asian, or other ethnic minorities in the UK than either academia or tech, which themselves are decidedly unrepresentative of society as a whole.

This is posed as an issue with research software development, but I think it’s more than that. One of the themes of this newsletter which I hope comes through is that binning research computing into “software development”, “systems”, “data management”, or “HPC” isn’t helpful - we all have the same challenges, the same goals, interlocking needs, and the boundaries between the bins are super fuzzy. We only solve issues by working together. And this is a research computing problem which the whole discipline needs to address together.

And it is a problem. Witness the fiasco around Numpy. Numpy’s paper, which I celebrated being in Nature last newsletter, had 23 authors - every single one of them men. When that was pointed out, the numpy twitter account started blocking people(!!) and then a number of contributors started trolling and dog piling on critics which … did not dampen the concerns.

We do have this issue, it’s worse than in just academia or tech individually, and we need to start fixing it. As managers, we can make sure our own hiring processes are surfacing excellent talent from all communities.