Abstract Many modern software applications present numerous ethical concerns due to conflicts between users’ values and companies’ priorities. Intersectional communities, those with multiple marginalized identities, are disproportionately affected by these ethical issues, leading to legal, financial, and reputational consequences for software companies, as well as real-world harm for intersectional users. Historically, the voices of intersectional communities have been systematically marginalized and excluded from contributing their unique perspectives to software design, perpetuating software-related ethical concerns. This work aims to fill the gap in research on intersectional users’ software-related perspectives and provide software practitioners with a methodology for analyzing intersectional voices in software ethics discourse. We collected 36,777 posts from over 700 intersectional subreddits discussing software applications and utilized large language models to identify ethical concerns in these posts. We then applied regression models with counterfactual analysis to examine how intersectional identity dimensions shape the amplification or suppression of ethical concern expression across software genres, and conducted a time-series analysis to examine how concern expression varies over time in relation to real-world events. As a case study in the social media domain, we further demonstrate how identified ethical concerns can be prioritized to surface issues warranting timely developer attention, validated against survey-derived ground truth. Together, these analyses form the basis of a nascent feedback-driven framework for assessing whether software systems are meeting the needs of intersectional users.

Historically, cisgender men have maintained systemic social, cultural, and political privilege over other genders. Online discrimination serves as a mechanism for reinforcing this dominance. Content moderation plays a crucial role in shaping online experiences, yet the ways it may perpetuate or mitigate discrimination remain underexplored. This study examines how content moderation and discussions of discrimination vary across gendered online communities, with a focus on identifying differential impacts by gender group. We analyzed 124 subreddits spanning three gender groups—women, men, and gender minorities (GM). The analysis included manual annotation of 1,535 posts and machine learning classification of an additional 6,613 posts to assess the prevalence of user discussions regarding online discrimination and content moderation. Women were most likely to report top-down moderation issues, such as bans and content removal, while GM users engaged more frequently with general moderation concerns. Time series analysis revealed that complaints about content moderation have increased over time, with the steepest rise among women users. These patterns demonstrate that moderation policies and enforcement impact gender groups differently. Our findings highlight the need for improvements in software engineering and user experience design for content moderation tools. Enhancing transparency, promoting equity, and enabling more user-driven moderation experiences are critical steps toward protecting marginalized groups against discrimination online.

Abstract Gender diversity and equity are known problems in the software industry. However, relatively few studies has examined the everyday work experiences and barriers that software professionals in technical roles encounter through a gender perspective. In this work, we investigate micro-inequities (e.g., interruptions, lack of eye contact, being assigned menial tasks in a project) and barriers experienced by software professionals working in technical roles with a gender perspective. We also analyzed age as a confounding factor. In our study, we surveyed 359 software professionals (50:50, women:men ratio) from globally distributed locations. Our results show that women and respondents in certain age groups encounter micro-inequities significantly more than men and other age groups. Further, women experience and witness sexism and harassment in the workplace in significantly higher numbers. We also found that women report having significantly less support and authority to make necessary decisions in their work, are less satisfied with their pay, and feel less valued and recognized in their teams. Finally, we found that the main barriers reported by women are related to team dynamics and gender biases, while men report most on technical and project related issues. Our results can serve to create awareness in the community about the large disparity and help practitioners revise their training programs and internal policies.