Researchers Study Software Gender Gap

While software used by the country's 3 million professional programmers include ample debugging tools to ensure their code works as it should, the increasingly complex software used by everyday PC users doesn't.

Research like Beckwith's may help ensure that when the industry starts adding new features for those everyday computer users, differences between men and women aren't left out of the equation.

What's more, making complex everyday software more accessible to women could help get more of them interested in computer science, Beckwith and Burnett believe.

As it is, the percentage of bachelor's degrees in computer science awarded to women fell from 37 percent in 1985 to just 22 percent in 2005, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, even as women made gains in other science and math-based fields.

Most gender-gap theories today have more to do with computer science's image as a haven for solitary male geeks. Industry groups and high-tech companies tend to suggest remedies like mentoring girls, and changing computer science education to better show how the field is connected to everyday topics thought to be of more interest to girls, like media, sharing and communicating.

While Beckwith and Burnett acknowledge that there are numerous social and developmental factors behind the gender gap, they say their research adds a new dimension to the debate.

"The first time you as a girl sit down at a computer to do some real problem solving," Burnett said, "and the software you're using isn't a good fit for your learning style, your problem solving style, how likely are you to be to say, `I'm going to grow up and be a computer scientist?'"

Julie Jacko, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and president of the Association for Computing Machinery's group on human-computer interaction, said research like Beckwith's could end up changing how young women feel about computers.

"We know from our colleagues in psychology and sociology that there are gender differences that can be very important to take into account in human-computer interaction and software design," Jacko said. "Projects like this can help us have a better impact, even at younger ages, where I believe interventions need to happen."

The research may be early, but the software industry is paying attention. Beckwith's first job isn't in academia _ it's at Microsoft Corp.

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."

But don't expect "Excel for Women" any time soon. Beckwith and Burnett point out that there are male computer users whose learning styles and problem-solving skills have more in common with the typical female user, and vice versa.

As Burnett said, "We're not advocating a pink version of blue version of software, because that wouldn't fit anybody."

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On the Net:

Beckwith's dissertation:

http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/library/?call2007-22