Feel it, code it: emotional goal modelling for gender-inclusive design

Context and motivation: Organisational values such as inclusion are often explicit, providing a common language to guide behaviour and motivate employees. Personal values are often less explicit but do guide individuals’ decisions, and when challenged they generate an emotional response. However, understanding organisational values and linking them to implicit personal values of employees can be challenging.

Question/problem: In this paper, we investigate the use of emotional goal models to act as a link between organisational and personal values.

Principal ideas/result: We argue that when designing processes and systems for enacting organisational values, requirements engineers must consider the diverse personal values of the employees. We completed a case study within a multi-national organisation and identified pain points on career journeys which amplify the disparity of experience between men and women. We applied emotional goal modelling to elicit requirements for inclusive processes. We suggest that emotional goals can serve as a proxy for personal values and can support the formulation of requirements for designing processes cognizant of the organisational value of inclusion.

Contribution: Our empirical evaluation suggests that the modelling of emotional goals can support the operationalisation of values as requirements for gender-inclusive organisational processes and systems.