A Survey of Sustainability in the Workplace of ICT Professionals using the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change

By: Juan M. Carrillo de Gea, José Alberto Garcia-Berna, José L. Fernández-Alemán, Joaquín Nicolás, Begoña Moros, Ambrosio Toval, Ali Idri

Associate Editor: Sofia Ouhbi

We live in a finite world, with limited resources. The idea of sustainable development arises to counteract the overexploitation of natural and environmental resources. The World Commission on Environment and Development (a.k.a. the Brundtland’s Commission), defined sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). At the same time, the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) represent an important driver of innovation, competitiveness and sustained long-term growth for modern knowledge-based societies (Cardona, Kretschmer, & Strobel, 2013). ICT are also recognized catalysts of sustainable development and they can boost the impact of sustainable development efforts (Zelenika & Pearce, 2013). However, positive and negative impacts of ICT on sustainability tend to cancel each other out, and it is crucial to actively design policies that encourage ICT applications that result on a positive outcome for the environment (Hilty et al., 2006).

In an organizational context, behavior change is an important tool to improve compliance with business processes and policies (Gelles, 2016). There are many theories of behavior change: diffusion of innovations, hierarchy of effects, steps to behavior change, stages of change or transtheoretical model (TTM), social learning theory and social cognitive theory, theory of reasoned action and theory of planned behavior, health belief model, operant conditioning, value-belief-norm theory, Fogg behavior model, and DO IT process, just to name a few. In particular, the TTM of behavior change includes five stages, ranging from no intention to change, to maintain behavior: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, and maintenance. Behavior change takes place when people progress—or move back—towards a desired behavior. While the TTM of behavior change has been mostly applied in health research, there are similarities between health behavior and environmental behavior (Nisbet & Gick, 2008).

In this work, we specifically address the stage construct of the TTM with the purpose of characterizing behavior change among ICT professionals about four key sustainability areas: (1) electric consumption, (2) waste treatment, (3) water consumption, and (4) transport and mobility. A total of 141 participants from ICT companies participated in an industry survey in the Region of Murcia (Spain) through an on-line questionnaire. We gathered information from all the respondents about their individual behavior at the workplace regarding the four sustainability areas. There were 26 individual behavior questions designed to be rated on a 3-point unipolar Likert-type scale (i.e. No, In some cases, Yes), and we also included a Not applicable (N/A) response option. An additional question was included at the end of each block of questions that depends on the previous answers (i.e. a filter or contingency question) to assign the respondents to the specific stage of change in each sustainability dimension under study.

Figures 1-4 show the results for each sustainability dimension under study. Our findings suggest that the ICT professionals are generally respectful with the environment, especially in relation to electric consumption, waste treatment, and water consumption. With regard to transport and mobility, the situation is not so good. All this is more evident if we move on to Figure 5, where we show the percentage of respondents in each stage of the TTM for each sustainability dimension. 

Figure 1. What sustainable habits do you have at work in relation to electric consumption?

Figure 2. What sustainable habits do you have at work regarding waste treatment?

Figure 3. What sustainable habits do you have at work with respect to water consumption?

Figure 4. What sustainable habits do you have at work in terms of transport and mobility?

Figure 5. Percentage of respondents in each stage of the TTM

Our study is still under development and we are currently working on expanding the results posted here. All in all, we hope that the information obtained will help ICT professionals to become aware that it is also possible to contribute to sustainable development through our behaviors in the workplace.

References

Cardona, M., Kretschmer, T., & Strobel, T. (2013). ICT and productivity: conclusions from the empirical literature. Information Economics and Policy, 25(3), 109-125.

Gelles, M. G. (2016). Chapter 2 - common challenges to maturing an insider threat program. In M. G. Gelles (Ed.), Insider threat(pp. 19-37). Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Hilty, L. M., Arnfalk, P., Erdmann, L., Goodman, J., Lehmann, M., & Wäger, P. A. (2006). The relevance of information and communication technologies for environmental sustainability - a prospective simulation study. Environmental Modelling and Software, 21(11), 1618-1629.

Nisbet, E. K. L., & Gick, M. L. (2008). Can health psychology help the planet? applying theory and models of health behaviour to environmental actions. Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 49(4), 296-303.

World Commission on Environment and Development. (1987). Our common future. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

Zelenika, I., & Pearce, J. M. (2013). The internet and other ICTs as tools and catalysts for sustainable development: innovation for 21st century. Information Development, 29(3), 217-232.

Participation of Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software. What is the current status and how much has changed in the last 10 years?

Participation of Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software. What is the current status and how much has changed in the last 10 years?

by Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Jesús M. González-Barahona and Santiago Dueñas Domı́nguez.
Associate editor: Stefano Zacchiroli (@zacchiro)

It is well known that women are generally underrepresented in the IT sector. However, in FLOSS (free, libre, and open source) projects the number of women reported is even lower (from 2% to 5% according to several surveys, such as FLOSS 2002 [1] or FLOSSPols [2]). The FLOSS community is aware of this situation, and some projects, such as GNOME and Debian, have promoted the attraction of female participants.

As the previous surveys date back from the early 2000s, we designed a new web survey in 2013 which was answered by more than 2,000 FLOSS contributors, of which more than 200 were women. From the analysis of the answers provided by men and women, mainly those ones that are on their involvement with FLOSS, their educational level and background and personal status, we wanted to shed some light on how the status of female participation in FLOSS is. This blog post shows a glimpse of this. The survey responses are publicly available and documented for further analysis by third parties [3].

We have found that women begin to collaborate at a later age than men. Interestingly enough, as can be seen from Figure 1, while both peak at the age of 21, the tail for women is not that abrupt than the one for men. So, women that start in their thirties are 70% of the ones in the 20s, while for men this number decreases to 30%.

Figure 1 - Age of first contribution to FLOSS. Source [4].

Women perform more diverse tasks than men. While the latter are mostly concentrated on coding tasks (only slightly above 20% of men perform other tasks), with almost 45% "other type of contributions" is the main task chosen by women. The percentage of women who mainly code is 31%, as can be seen from Figure 2.

Figure 2 - Type of contributions to FLOSS projects. Source [4]

Figure 3 shows that while a majority of FLOSS participants does not have children, the number of those who have varies largely depending on their gender. So, the number of women with children (19%) is almost half the number of men with children (34%) as shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3 - Answers to the question Do you have children?.

Graphs have different scales. Source [4]

If we have a look at how much time FLOSS contributors devote to FLOSS, we obtain Figure 4. At first sight the distribution might seem very similar, but a closer look shows that the share of men devoting less than 5 hours/week (50%) is lower than for women (54%), as is the the amount of men working 40 or more hours per week (12% for men and 15% for women). So, contributions to FLOSS projects by women are over-represented among the less active and the full-time professional contributors, in the latter case being probably hired by an industrial software company.

Figure 4 - Number of hours per week devoted to contributing to FLOSS projects. 

Graphs have different scales. Source [4]

All in all, our study confirms (and extends) the results from FLOSS [1] and FLOSSPols [2], even if almost 10 years have passed between both. Even if it is possible that the amount of women is now slightly higher, many contextual patterns have remained the same. So, a study of GitHub developers from 2015 found that only around 6% were women [5], but this increase could be due to the major involvement of the software industry in FLOSS. The current situation is far from what ten years ago was set as a goal, so we may speak of a "lost decade" in the inclusion of women in FLOSS.

A pre-print copy of the full paper "Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The situation in the 2010s" [4] can be found at https://flosshub.org/sites/flosshub.org/files/paper-pre.pdf.

References

[1] Rishab A Ghosh, Ruediger Glott, Bernhard Krieger, and Gregorio Robles. Free/libre and open source software: Survey and study, 2002.
[2] Dawn Nafus, James Leach, and Bernhard Krieger. Gender: Integrated report of findings. FLOSSPOLS, Deliverable D, 16, 2006.
[3] Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Alexander Serebrenik, Bogdan Vasilescu, and Jesús M González-Barahona. FLOSS 2013: A survey dataset about free software contributors: Challenges for curating, sharing, and combining. In MSR, pages 396-399, 2014. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2597073.2597129
[4] Gregorio Robles, Laura Arjona Reina, Jesús M. González-Barahona, and Santiago Dueñas Domı́nguez. Women in Free/Libre/Open Source Software: The situation in the 2010s. In OSS 2016, IFIP AICT 472, pp. 163–173, 2016. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39225-7_13
[5] https://www.toptal.com/open-source/is-open-source-open-to-women