Although there have been many studies designed to understand and ameliorate the low representation of females in computing, there has been little research into how software itself fits into the picture. This talk reports the investigations we have been conducting into whether and how software and its features affect females’ and males’ performance in computing tasks. Our focus is on how “gender-neutral” software interacts with gender differences. Specifically, we have concentrated on software aimed at supporting everyday users doing end-user programming. For example, what if female end-user programmers would do better in debugging formula errors in their Excel spreadsheets, if the software were changed to take gender differences into account?
Margaret Burnett is a professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University, and is one of the recipients of a 2007 IBM Faculty Award. Her research focuses on human issues of programming languages and environments, especially when the programming is done by males and females not trained as professional programmers. She is founding Project Director of the EUSES Consortium, a three-year-old collaboration among Oregon State University, Carnegie Mellon University, Drexel University, Pennsylvania State University, University of Cambridge, University of Nebraska, and, most recently, IBM, to help End Users Shape Effective Software.
Andrew Black