Pain in a Safe Space: Mapping Emotions and Discourse in the Womenintech Subreddit
Resumo
Women in Information Technology (WIT) continue to face systemic challenges, including career stagnation, lack of recognition, workplace bias, and professional isolation. In response, external support networks such as the r/womenintech subreddit have emerged, offering a dedicated and inclusive space for women in Software Engineering (SE) to exchange experiences, seek advice, and build community. This study investigates the discursive landscape of this subreddit by analyzing 2,367 posts published between April 2024 and April 2025. We applied a set of natural language processing (NLP) techniques, using the Twitter-based RoBERTa model, to conduct a multi-dimensional analysis that includes emotion detection, sentiment analysis, hate speech classification, irony detection, and offensive content identification. Our findings show that 99.9% of the posts are free of hate speech, reinforcing the subreddit’s role as a safe space for women in tech to share experiences. However, the prevalence of the emotion Sadness (45%) reveal that the experiences reported are often distressing and unpleasant. In addition, we explore temporal trends in politically charged contexts of DEIA law. Our study highlights the importance of better understanding the underlying structural and cultural factors that contribute to these emotions and open new directions for further analysis.
Palavras-chave:
Crowdsourcing in Software Engineering, Reddit, Human Aspects
Referências
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Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Rocha, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2024. Do you think there is no gender inequality in Software Engineering? Perhaps you should reconsider your opinion. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development 12, 1 (2024), 10–1.
Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Soares, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, Verônica Souza Dos Santos, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2023. Do you see what happens around you? Men’s Perceptions of Gender Inequality in Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. 464–474.
Cathlin V Clark-Gordon, Nicholas D Bowman, Alan K Goodboy, and Alyssa Wright. 2019. Anonymity and online self-disclosure: A meta-analysis. Communication Reports 32, 2 (2019), 98–111.
Giulio Corsi, Elizabeth Seger, and Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh. 2024. Crowdsourcing the Mitigation of disinformation and misinformation: The case of spontaneous community-based moderation on Reddit. Online Social Networks and Media 43-44 (2024), 100291. DOI: 10.1016/j.osnem.2024.100291
Daniel Coutinho, Luisa Cito, Maria Vitória Lima, Beatriz Arantes, Juliana Alves Pereira, Johny Arriel, João Godinho, Vinicius Martins, Paulo Vítor CF Libório, Leonardo Leite, et al. 2024. " Looks Good To Me;-)": Assessing Sentiment Analysis Tools for Pull Request Discussions. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. 211–221.
Jenny L Davis and Timothy Graham. 2021. Emotional consequences and attention rewards: The social effects of ratings on Reddit. Information, Communication & Society 24, 5 (2021), 649–666.
Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Rocha, Heloise Acco Tives, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2024. Unveiling women’s expectations as ICT professionals: A survey study. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering. 14–21.
Shereen Fouad and Ezzaldin Alkooheji. 2023. Sentiment analysis for women in stem using twitter and transfer learning models. In 2023 IEEE 17th international conference on semantic computing (ICSC). IEEE, 227–234.
Benjamin D. Horne, Sibel Adali, and Sujoy Sikdar. 2017. Identifying the social signals that drive online discussions: A case study of Reddit communities. arXiv:1705.02673 [cs.SI] [link]
Allison Jacobs, Shivangi Chopra, and Lukasz Golab. 2020. Reddit Mining to Understand Women’s Issues in STEM.. In EDBT/ICDT Workshops.
Yukiko Maeda, XiyuWang, Yuxiao Zhang, Josiah Bansueda Banks, and Rachael H Kenney. 2025. Balancing Human and Machine Coding: Evaluating the Credibility and Potential of Topic Modeling for Open-Ended Survey Responses. Computers in Human Behavior (2025), 108703.
Umid Mammadov. 2025. Dark Humor on Reddit: A Pragmatic Linguistic Analysis. 15 (03 2025), 180–200.
Shwe Zin Su Naing and Piyachat Udomwong. 2024. Public Opinions on ChatGPT: An Analysis of Reddit Discussions by Using Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, and SWOT Analysis. Data Intelligence 6, 2 (2024), 344–374.
Alessa Oliveira, Sávio Freire, Edna Dias Canedo, Manoel Mendonça, and Larissa Rocha. 2025. Investigating the Challenges Faced by Women on Software Engineering: a Grey Literature Study. In 2025 IEEE/ACM Sixth Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering (GEICSE). IEEE, 17–24.
Antônio Pereira, Felipe Viegas, Diego Roberto Colombo Dias, Elisa Tuler, Ana Cláudia Machado, Guilherme Fonseca, Marcos André Gonçalves, and Leonardo Rocha. 2025. “Are the current topic modeling evaluation metrics enough?” Mitigating the limitations of topic modeling evaluation metrics using a multi-perspective game theoretic approach. Knowledge-Based Systems (2025), 113634.
Nicholas Proferes, Naiyan Jones, Sarah Gilbert, Casey Fiesler, and Michael Zimmer. 2021. Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics. Social Media + Society 7, 2 (2021), 20563051211019004. DOI: 10.1177/20563051211019004 arXiv: [link]
Reddit. 2025. Reddit Announces First Quarter 2025 Results. Retrieved May 07, 2025 from [link]
Reddit. 2025. rwomenintech. [link]. Accessed: July 15, 2025.
Jessica Ribas, Joanne Carneiro, Theo Sousa, Júlia Azevedo, Jailma Januario, Anderson Uchôa, and Juliana Alves Pereira. 2025. Supplementary Materials for Pain in a Safe Space: Mapping Emotions and Discourse in the Womenintech Community. [link]. Accessed: July 15, 2025.
Diana Rieger, Anna Sophie Kümpel, Maximilian Wich, Toni Kiening, and Georg Groh. 2021. Assessing the Extent and Types of Hate Speech in Fringe Communities: A Case Study of Alt-Right Communities on 8chan, 4chan, and Reddit. Social Media + Society 7, 4 (2021), 20563051211052906. DOI: 10.1177/20563051211052906 arXiv: [link]
Larissa Rocha, Edna Dias Canedo, Claudia Pinto Pereira, Carla Bezerra, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2023. Investigating the perceived impact of maternity on software engineering: a women’s perspective. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE). IEEE, 138–149.
Kashfia Sailunaz and Reda Alhajj. 2019. Emotion and sentiment analysis from Twitter text. Journal of Computational Science 36 (2019), 101003. DOI: 10.1016/j.jocs.2019.05.009
Md Saiful Islam Sajol, A S M Jahid Hasan, Md Shazid Islam, and Md Saydur Rahman. 2024. Transforming Social Media Analysis: TweetEval Benchmarking with Advanced Transformer Models. In 2024 8th International Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovative Technologies (ISMSIT). 1–6. DOI: 10.1109/ISMSIT63511.2024.10757178
Angelica Pereira Souza, Anderson Uchôa, Edna Dias Canedo, Juliana Alves Pereira, Claudia Pinto Pereira, and Larissa Rocha. 2025. Overcoming Obstacles: Challenges of Gender Inequality in Undergraduate ICT Programs. In 6th ACM/IEEE Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering (GE) (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). IEEE, 1–8.
Minaoar Hossain Tanzil, Shaiful Chowdhury, Somayeh Modaberi, Gias Uddin, and Hadi Hemmati. 2025. A systematic mapping study of crowd knowledge enhanced software engineering research using Stack Overflow. Journal of Systems and Software (2025), 112405.
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW1, Article 61 (April 2022), 25 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3512908
Donald J. Trump. 2025. Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. Executive Order No. 14151, 90 Fed. Reg. 8339 (Jan. 29, 2025). [link] Presidential Document No. 2025-01953; Executive Office of the President; pp. 8339–8341.
Xinchen Yu, Eduardo Blanco, and Lingzi Hong. 2022. Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter. arXiv:2206.06423 [cs.CL] [link]
Xiaoxia Zhang, Xiuyuan Qi, and Zixin Teng. 2024. Performance evaluation of Reddit Comments using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing methods in Sentiment Analysis. arXiv:2405.16810 [cs.CL] [link]
Maliheh Alaeddini. 2024. Emotion Detection in Reddit: Comparative Study of Machine Learning and Deep Learning Techniques. arXiv:2411.10328 [cs.CL] [link]
Francesco Barbieri, Jose Camacho-Collados, Luis Espinosa-Anke, and Leonardo Neves. 2020. TweetEval:Unified Benchmark and Comparative Evaluation for Tweet Classification. In Proceedings of Findings of EMNLP.
Marcelo Werneck Barbosa and André Gomes. 2025. Themes and sentiments in conversations about food waste on Twitter: Proposal of a framework using neural topic modeling. Food Quality and Preference 122 (2025), 105311.
Bryce Boe. 2023. Praw: The python reddit api wrapper#, PRAW 7.7.1 documentation. [link]. Accessed: July 15, 2025.
Victor R Basili-Gianluigi Caldiera and H Dieter Rombach. 1994. Goal question metric paradigm. Encyclopedia of software engineering 1, 528-532 (1994), 6.
Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Rocha, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2024. Do you think there is no gender inequality in Software Engineering? Perhaps you should reconsider your opinion. Journal of Software Engineering Research and Development 12, 1 (2024), 10–1.
Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Soares, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, Verônica Souza Dos Santos, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2023. Do you see what happens around you? Men’s Perceptions of Gender Inequality in Software Engineering. In Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. 464–474.
Cathlin V Clark-Gordon, Nicholas D Bowman, Alan K Goodboy, and Alyssa Wright. 2019. Anonymity and online self-disclosure: A meta-analysis. Communication Reports 32, 2 (2019), 98–111.
Giulio Corsi, Elizabeth Seger, and Sean Ó hÉigeartaigh. 2024. Crowdsourcing the Mitigation of disinformation and misinformation: The case of spontaneous community-based moderation on Reddit. Online Social Networks and Media 43-44 (2024), 100291. DOI: 10.1016/j.osnem.2024.100291
Daniel Coutinho, Luisa Cito, Maria Vitória Lima, Beatriz Arantes, Juliana Alves Pereira, Johny Arriel, João Godinho, Vinicius Martins, Paulo Vítor CF Libório, Leonardo Leite, et al. 2024. " Looks Good To Me;-)": Assessing Sentiment Analysis Tools for Pull Request Discussions. In Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering. 211–221.
Jenny L Davis and Timothy Graham. 2021. Emotional consequences and attention rewards: The social effects of ratings on Reddit. Information, Communication & Society 24, 5 (2021), 649–666.
Edna Dias Canedo, Larissa Rocha, Heloise Acco Tives, Geovana Ramos Sousa Silva, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2024. Unveiling women’s expectations as ICT professionals: A survey study. In Proceedings of the 5th ACM/IEEE Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering. 14–21.
Shereen Fouad and Ezzaldin Alkooheji. 2023. Sentiment analysis for women in stem using twitter and transfer learning models. In 2023 IEEE 17th international conference on semantic computing (ICSC). IEEE, 227–234.
Benjamin D. Horne, Sibel Adali, and Sujoy Sikdar. 2017. Identifying the social signals that drive online discussions: A case study of Reddit communities. arXiv:1705.02673 [cs.SI] [link]
Allison Jacobs, Shivangi Chopra, and Lukasz Golab. 2020. Reddit Mining to Understand Women’s Issues in STEM.. In EDBT/ICDT Workshops.
Yukiko Maeda, XiyuWang, Yuxiao Zhang, Josiah Bansueda Banks, and Rachael H Kenney. 2025. Balancing Human and Machine Coding: Evaluating the Credibility and Potential of Topic Modeling for Open-Ended Survey Responses. Computers in Human Behavior (2025), 108703.
Umid Mammadov. 2025. Dark Humor on Reddit: A Pragmatic Linguistic Analysis. 15 (03 2025), 180–200.
Shwe Zin Su Naing and Piyachat Udomwong. 2024. Public Opinions on ChatGPT: An Analysis of Reddit Discussions by Using Sentiment Analysis, Topic Modeling, and SWOT Analysis. Data Intelligence 6, 2 (2024), 344–374.
Alessa Oliveira, Sávio Freire, Edna Dias Canedo, Manoel Mendonça, and Larissa Rocha. 2025. Investigating the Challenges Faced by Women on Software Engineering: a Grey Literature Study. In 2025 IEEE/ACM Sixth Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering (GEICSE). IEEE, 17–24.
Antônio Pereira, Felipe Viegas, Diego Roberto Colombo Dias, Elisa Tuler, Ana Cláudia Machado, Guilherme Fonseca, Marcos André Gonçalves, and Leonardo Rocha. 2025. “Are the current topic modeling evaluation metrics enough?” Mitigating the limitations of topic modeling evaluation metrics using a multi-perspective game theoretic approach. Knowledge-Based Systems (2025), 113634.
Nicholas Proferes, Naiyan Jones, Sarah Gilbert, Casey Fiesler, and Michael Zimmer. 2021. Studying Reddit: A Systematic Overview of Disciplines, Approaches, Methods, and Ethics. Social Media + Society 7, 2 (2021), 20563051211019004. DOI: 10.1177/20563051211019004 arXiv: [link]
Reddit. 2025. Reddit Announces First Quarter 2025 Results. Retrieved May 07, 2025 from [link]
Reddit. 2025. rwomenintech. [link]. Accessed: July 15, 2025.
Jessica Ribas, Joanne Carneiro, Theo Sousa, Júlia Azevedo, Jailma Januario, Anderson Uchôa, and Juliana Alves Pereira. 2025. Supplementary Materials for Pain in a Safe Space: Mapping Emotions and Discourse in the Womenintech Community. [link]. Accessed: July 15, 2025.
Diana Rieger, Anna Sophie Kümpel, Maximilian Wich, Toni Kiening, and Georg Groh. 2021. Assessing the Extent and Types of Hate Speech in Fringe Communities: A Case Study of Alt-Right Communities on 8chan, 4chan, and Reddit. Social Media + Society 7, 4 (2021), 20563051211052906. DOI: 10.1177/20563051211052906 arXiv: [link]
Larissa Rocha, Edna Dias Canedo, Claudia Pinto Pereira, Carla Bezerra, and Fabiana Freitas Mendes. 2023. Investigating the perceived impact of maternity on software engineering: a women’s perspective. In 2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE). IEEE, 138–149.
Kashfia Sailunaz and Reda Alhajj. 2019. Emotion and sentiment analysis from Twitter text. Journal of Computational Science 36 (2019), 101003. DOI: 10.1016/j.jocs.2019.05.009
Md Saiful Islam Sajol, A S M Jahid Hasan, Md Shazid Islam, and Md Saydur Rahman. 2024. Transforming Social Media Analysis: TweetEval Benchmarking with Advanced Transformer Models. In 2024 8th International Symposium on Multidisciplinary Studies and Innovative Technologies (ISMSIT). 1–6. DOI: 10.1109/ISMSIT63511.2024.10757178
Angelica Pereira Souza, Anderson Uchôa, Edna Dias Canedo, Juliana Alves Pereira, Claudia Pinto Pereira, and Larissa Rocha. 2025. Overcoming Obstacles: Challenges of Gender Inequality in Undergraduate ICT Programs. In 6th ACM/IEEE Workshop on Gender Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering (GE) (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). IEEE, 1–8.
Minaoar Hossain Tanzil, Shaiful Chowdhury, Somayeh Modaberi, Gias Uddin, and Hadi Hemmati. 2025. A systematic mapping study of crowd knowledge enhanced software engineering research using Stack Overflow. Journal of Systems and Software (2025), 112405.
Nathan TeBlunthuis, Charles Kiene, Isabella Brown, Laura (Alia) Levi, Nicole McGinnis, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2022. No Community Can Do Everything: Why People Participate in Similar Online Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW1, Article 61 (April 2022), 25 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3512908
Donald J. Trump. 2025. Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing. Executive Order No. 14151, 90 Fed. Reg. 8339 (Jan. 29, 2025). [link] Presidential Document No. 2025-01953; Executive Office of the President; pp. 8339–8341.
Xinchen Yu, Eduardo Blanco, and Lingzi Hong. 2022. Hate Speech and Counter Speech Detection: Conversational Context Does Matter. arXiv:2206.06423 [cs.CL] [link]
Xiaoxia Zhang, Xiuyuan Qi, and Zixin Teng. 2024. Performance evaluation of Reddit Comments using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing methods in Sentiment Analysis. arXiv:2405.16810 [cs.CL] [link]
Publicado
22/09/2025
Como Citar
RIBAS, Jessica; CARNEIRO, Joanne; SOUSA, Theo; AZEVEDO, Júlia; JANUÁRIO, Jailma; UCHÔA, Anderson; PEREIRA, Juliana Alves.
Pain in a Safe Space: Mapping Emotions and Discourse in the Womenintech Subreddit. In: SIMPÓSIO BRASILEIRO DE ENGENHARIA DE SOFTWARE (SBES), 39. , 2025, Recife/PE.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 727-733.
ISSN 2833-0633.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbes.2025.11171.
