The lack of women in the different fields of Engineering and, in this case, in Information Technology (IT), as well as the challenges, inequality of opportunities, and discrimination that they face, has for several decades been a pending issue on agendas worldwide. When the United Nations (UN) presented the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2015, they introduced the SDG 5 with the aim to achieve gender equality across all areas of our society.

In recent years, different efforts have been made through the different fields of knowledge to achieve the targets identified in the SDG 5. However, although significant progress has been made and good foundations have been established in this regard, progress is very slow and scant, needing more proposals that address the problems identified through the analyzes performed.

In this sense, the main objective of this study is to present a proposal to help achieve gender balance and address the challenges faced by women in the specific field of software development. The presence and representation of women in the IT industry is very scarce and not only affects the motivation and aspirations of women to develop professionally in this field, but also the quality, mainly, of the products developed in this regard. There are many examples of software products that are not inclusive and that discriminate against various sectors of society, due to the lack of diversity and inclusion of all types of people (including women) during their development.

For this reason, it is important to address the problem from the foundations and develop proposals that help improve, in this case, the existing software development processes, achieving greater equality and diversity that positively impacts the final products.

The challenges that women face in the Information Technology (IT) industry are prominent and complex, and it is essential to review whether the current processes address these issues or represent a barrier to the participation of women in software development. It has been found that teams that champion diversity and the inclusion of women achieve better results. Thus, as long as women remain a minority in software development processes, the resulting repercussions on the software products should be reviewed. This study tries to analyze and understand what actions can be established to improve software development processes, and consequently their resulting products and outputs, in which there is gender inequality or discrimination. For this purpose, we have performed 12 semi-structured interviews to gather data from experienced representatives, including both developers and project leaders, from the IT industry in Norway, with the aim to identify recurring themes and improvement opportunities in this regard. The results show a diversity of opinions on what actions to implement to limit drop-out among women in IT. Some of the ideas or practices identified through these results involve conducting training courses on diversity and equality, providing regular positive feedback, establishing coding and code review standards, or creating more inclusive and diverse development teams, among others. We believe that the input on previously discovered barriers for women together with the findings from our interviews give us the foundations for continuing working and developing new ideas that can be implemented into software development processes, with the aim of making them more inclusive and increasing the diversity of the resulting solutions in this regard.

When talking about sustainability, we usually think that it is only about safeguarding the environment; nothing is further from reality. Of course, the environment is a crucial component of sustainability and our survival, but it is important to recall that the society and the economy play important roles in this regard, and without the interconnection and development of these three perspectives it will not be possible to achieve sustainable progress. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations (UN) defend this idea and address the main challenges that humanity faces. One of these challenges is gender equality, which is identified in the perspective of social sustainability through SDG 5. Gender equality is a very complex and difficult challenge to address due to the great cultural diversity of our society. Thus, achieving this goal will require laying a solid foundation and working together by combining very different fields of knowledge. In this sense, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of the fields that is currently having the greatest impact and relevance for the development of new technologies and for the advancement of numerous areas. This growing evolution of AI demonstrates that its repercussions at the social level must be analyzed and addressed in such a way that AI becomes a positive asset for sustainability and, in this particular case, for gender equality.

For all these reasons, this study aims to analyze the current state of the art and collect the existing knowledge in the fields of AI and gender equality, by conducting a Systematic Mapping Study (SMS). The obtained results and findings have allowed us to identify the most relevant advances in this regard, as well as the gaps and drawbacks that currently exist and on which we must urgently focus to address gender equality both in and by AI. In the same way, these findings demonstrate the limited joint development of both fields, but also indicate an increase in the relevance and the number of proposals that these fields are receiving in recent years.