Diversity in Higher Education - Obligation or Nice to Have?

Diversity competence is required in professional life as well as in higher education. This also holds true for software engineering since software engineers often must cope with a wide variety of stakeholders within a single project, but also across consecutive projects. This paper tries to find out, what exactly is understood by diversity competence in software engineering and how it is addressed in higher education. Are there some systematic approaches to improve diversity competence in higher education? A literature study shows the state of research in software engineering and higher education in software engineering with respect to diversity. The main finding is that there is neither a clear understanding what diversity means in detail in software engineering education, nor an idea how to systematically address diversity competence. This article pinpoints some challenges in addressing diversity competence in engineering education. Furthermore, it provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical foundations of diversity in other disciplines as well as the relevance of diversity and diversity competence. This article highlights the importance of diversity competence and shows consequences when missing, in particular in software engineering. As a result, the paper develops some ideas how diversity competence can be addressed in higher education systematically. All in all, the importance and integration of diversity competence in higher education for software engineering and development processes are highlighted. Key points for a diversity-sensitive higher education are proposed.