Abstract:
A human-centric issue that has not been considered in
the design of end-user programming environments is
whether gender differences exist that are important to the
design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would
miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of
end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate
mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in
decision making, learning, and problem solving. This
paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for
investigating this issue by surveying gender difference
literature from five domains from the perspective of
possible implications for end-user programming. We
present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number
of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated
as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point
for organized investigations into issues that may be
important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness
of end-user programmers.
