Gender gap in software

I found this interesting article about studies on gender difference in using software.

It started with Laura Beckwith studying how people use computer in everyday problem solving.

A couple of years ago, they stumbled upon an intriguing tidbit: Men, it seemed, were more likely than women to use advanced software features, specifically ones that help users find and fix errors. Programmers call this "debugging," and it's a crucial step in building programs that work.

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One theory grabbed her attention: High confidence correlates with success. Both men's and women's confidence in their ability to do a challenging task affects their approach and the outcome. And most studies indicated that women — even ones who study computer science — have less confidence than men in their computer skills.

Confidence in computer science has always been a debate. It is obvious it is a problem and from it stems more issues, but there is not one answer to fixing it. Beckwith conducted an experiment where men and women had to find errors in an excel document. While the error finding wasn't too revealing, the survey the participants took on their confidence levels, were.

For men, it didn't really matter whether they believed they could complete the task. Some men with low confidence used the debugging tools, and some with high confidence didn't.

But for the women, only those who believed they could do the task successfully used the automated debugging tools. The women with lower confidence in the task relied instead on what they knew — editing formulas one by one — and ended up introducing more bugs than when they started.

Then the researcher took an approach that I think is very important to note.

As a computer scientist, Beckwith wasn't interested in changing women's confidence levels. She was interested in whether changing the software could help women over this hurdle.

So she explored whether a gentler presentation of the debugging tool, one that seemed to require less confidence, would appeal to women.

Only small changes were made to the next experiments. She added "maybe" buttons to the options of right and wrong. Used softer colors for errors, and eliminated the need for right-clicking in the experiment.

Beckwith tested the new feature during several other experiments. When she tallied up the numbers, she found that in some experiments, women used some form of the debugging feature almost as often as men did. In others, they used the debugging tools even more than men did.

The article goes on to explain more about gender gaps in computer science and how Beckwith will be joining Microsoft.

There, she'll put her research experience to work helping the team that designs software for programmers. That group has never given much thought to the user's gender, said Susan Todd, Beckwith's boss-to-be.

"In the past, since we concentrate so much on developers — and as you know, there are not a lot of women developers — we haven't really gone in that direction," Todd said. "I think it's going to be something that will be really quite interesting for us to look at."

This is fascinating and it is great to know that women's specific needs will be addressed in the making of software products. This experiment was very specific and targeted only one simple task, but the implications are important and need to be explored more.

Source MSNBC