Analysis of Gender Diversity in the Italian Community of Information Systems

We present a study on gender analysis of the Italian community of Information Systems—itAIS—based on a three-dimensional framework accounting for the context, the success, and the members’ attitudes. We represent the community as a semantic social network. We analyze the semantics of the information systems domain, the topology of the social network and the dynamics of interests by means of a suite of purposely-developed tools. The experimental work analyses the scientific papers accepted for presentation at the itAIS conference from 2007 to 2016. While the number of males is larger than that of females, we do not observe discrimination in the community. Moreover, despite observed diversity, Italian feminine scientists play a significant role in the community.