Abstract:
Although gender differences in a technological world are
receiving significant research attention, much of the
research and practice has aimed at how society and
education can impact the successes and retention of female
computer science professionals—but the possibility of
gender issues within software has received almost no
attention. If gender issues exist with some types of
software features, it is possible that accommodating them
by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but
only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we
empirically investigate gender differences for end users in
the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover
significant gender differences in feature acceptance, and
show that these differences can significantly impact
effectiveness.
