Gender HCI Project

What if females would be better supported at problem-solving if the problem-solving software they used were changed to take gender issues into account?

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. The possibility of gender issues within software, however, has received almost no attention. We hypothesize that factors within software have a strong impact on how well female problem solvers can make use of the software. Evidence from other fields and preliminary investigations of our own have already begun to reveal evidence supporting this hypothesis.

We are investigating the ways software supports or inhibits male and female problem solvers. We term this research topic "gender HCI" to reflect its focus on human-computer interaction (HCI) properties that take gender differences into account in the design of software. For a more complete discussion of Gender HCI see the Wikipedia article.

People who have contributed to this work include:

Margaret Burnett (Project Lead): Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University
Laura Beckwith: Free-lance HCI researcher
Alan Blackwell: Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge, UK
Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research
Umer Farooq, Microsoft
Xiaoli Fern: Assistant Professor, Oregon State University
Scott Fleming: Asst. University of Memphis
Valentina Grigoreanu: Microsoft
Shamsi Iqbal, Microsoft Research
Carlos Jensen: Assistant Professor, Oregon State University
Anna Corinne Hall: Director, Saturday Academy
Vaishnavi Narayanan: Microsoft
Simone Stumpf: Assistant Professor (Senior Research), Oregon State University and Lecturer, City University, London, UK
Neeraja Subrahmaniyan: Microsoft
Gina Venolia, Microsoft Research
Susan Wiedenbeck: College of Information Science and Technology Professor, Drexel University

Irwin Kwan: Postdoc, Oregon State University
Jill Cao: PhD Student, Oregon State University
Todd Kulesza: PhD Student, Oregon State University
Shraddha Sorte: MS 2006, Oregon State University
Thippaya Chintakovid: PhD student, Drexel University
Thomas Park: PhD student, Drexel University

Kyle Rector: Undergrad researcher until 2010 and Tektronix Scholar, Oregon State University. Now a PhD student at University of Washington

Nicole Usselman: Saturday Academy High School Intern '10 at Oregon State University
Diana Salazar: Saturday Academy High School Intern '09 at Oregon State University
Akshay Subramanian: Saturday Academy High School Intern '08 at Oregon State University
Rachel White: Saturday Academy High School Intern '08 at Oregon State University
Russell Drummond: Saturday Academy High School Intern '06 at Oregon State University
Karin Bucht: Saturday Academy High School Intern '06 at Oregon State University
Sienna Hiebert: Saturday Academy High School Intern '05 at Oregon State University
Michelle Hastings: Saturday Academy High School Intern '04 at Oregon State University

Talks

Here are some recent talks on this subject, with publically available abstracts and/or videos.

Here is a handful of mini-interviews done in Rome, June 2011, with Margaret Burnett and Chris Scaffidi for our new encyclopedia article, about End-User Programming, End-User Software Engineering, and Gender.
Margaret Burnett gave a keynote at ICPC late in June 2011 on this topic.
Margaret Burnett gave a keynote at PPIG 2010 early in September 2010 on this topic.
Here is a June 2009 Microsoft Channel 9 interview on Gender and Software with Margaret Burnett.
Laura Beckwith and Margaret Burnett gave a talk in September 2006 summarizing the findings at that time, at Microsoft Research Cambridge, on gender issues in end-user programming.

News

Feb 2012: Margaret Burnett is an ACM Distinguished Speaker now. If you want to have her give a talk on gender HCI, ACM will pay for my airfare to do so.
Sept. 2007: An AP story on Laura Beckwith's, Margaret Burnett's, and Susan Wiedenbeck's Gender HCI work was picked up by numerous news feeds.

Publications

End-User Debugging Strategies: A Sensemaking Perspective, Valentina Grigoreanu, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, Jill Cao, Kyle Rector, and Irwin Kwan, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, (to appear 2012).
Gender Pluralism in Problem-Solving Software, Margaret M. Burnett, Laura Beckwith, Susan Wiedenbeck, Scott D. Fleming, Jill Cao, Thomas H. Park, Valentina Grigoreanu, Kyle Rector, Interacting with Computers, 23(5), Elsevier, 2011, pp. 450-460. doi:10.1016/j.intcom.2011.06.004. Local copy.
A Debugging Perspective on End-User Mashup Programming, Jill Cao, Kyle Rector, Thomas H. Park, Scott D. Fleming, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Madrid, Spain, September 2010.
Gender Differences and Programming Environments: Across Programming Populations, Margaret Burnett, Scott D. Fleming, Shamsi Iqbal, Gina Venolia, Vidya Rajaram, Umer Farooq, Valentina Grigoreanu, Mary Czerwinski, ACM ESEM, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, September 16-17, 2010.
A strategy-centric approach to the design of end-user debugging tools, Valentina Grigoreanu, Margaret Burnett, and George Robertson, ACM CHI 2010, April 2010, pp. 713-722.
End-user mashup programming: Through the design lens, Jill Cao, Yann Riche, Susan Wiedenbeck, Margaret Burnett, and Valentina Grigoreanu, ACM CHI 2010, April 2010, pp. 1009-1018. (Best Paper Award Honorable Mention)
Mining Problem-Solving Strategies from HCI Data, Xiaoli Fern, Chaitanya Komireddy, Valentina Grigoreanu, Margaret Burnett, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 17(1) Article 3, March 2010, pp. 1-22.
Males' and Females' Script Debugging Strategies, Valentina Grigoreanu, James Brundage, Eric Bahna, Margaret Burnett, Paul ElRif, Jeffrey Snover, Second International Symposium on End-User Development, Siegen, Germany, March 2-4, 2009. (The posted version is a preprint.)
Fixing the Program My Computer Learned: Barriers for End Users, Challenges for the Machine, Todd Kulesza, Weng-Keen Wong, Simone Stumpf, Stephen Perona, Rachel White, Margaret Burnett, Ian Oberst, Andrew J. Ko, ACM Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Sanibel Island, Florida, Feb. 8-11, 2009, pp. 187-196.
Can Feature Design Reduce the Gender Gap in End-User Software Development Environments? Valentina Grigoreanu, Jill Cao, Todd Kulesza, Christopher Bogart, Kyle Rector, Margaret Burnett, and Susan Wiedenbeck, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Herrsching am Ammersee, Germany, Sept. 2008, pp. 149-156.
Integrating Rich User Feedback into Intelligent User Interfaces, Simone Stumpf, Erin Sullivan, Erin Fitzhenry, Ian Oberst, Weng-Keen Wong, Margaret Burnett, ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, January 2008. Here is the final version that was printed but unfortunately it is missing Table 2. Here is the corrected version.
Mining Interpretable Human Strategies: A Case Study Xiaoli Z. Fern, Chaitanya Komireddy, Margaret Burnett, IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, Omaha NE, October 2007.
On to the Real World: Gender and Self-Efficacy in Excel, Laura Beckwith, Derek Inman, Kyle Rector, and Margaret Burnett, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Couer dAlene, Idaho, Sept. 23-27, 2007, pp. 119-126
Explaining debugging strategies to end-user programmers, Neeraja Subrahmaniyan, Cory Kissinger, Kyle Rector, Derek Inman, Jared Kaplan, Laura Beckwith, and Margaret Burnett, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Couer dAlene, Idaho, Sept. 23-27, \ 2007, pp. 127-134.
Gender HCI Issues in End-User Programming, Laura Beckwith, Ph.D. Thesis, Oregon State University, 2007.
Gender HCI: What About the Software? Laura Beckwith, Margaret Burnett, Valentina Grigoreanu, Susan Wiedenbeck, Computer, 83-87, November 2006. (Here is the version that was printed. This is the original version.)
"Tinkering and Gender in End-User Programmers' Debugging," Laura Beckwith, Cory Kissinger, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, Joseph Lawrance, Alan Blackwell, Curtis Cook, ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (CHI'06), Montreal, Canada, April 2006.
"Cultural Differences and End-User Computing," Thippaya Chitakovid, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 325-326, September 2005.
"Designing Features for Both Genders in End-User Software Engineering Environments," Laura Beckwith, Shraddha Sorte, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, Thippaya Chintakovid, and Curtis Cook, IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, 153-160, September 2005.
"Effectiveness of End-User Debugging Software Features: Are There Gender Issues?", Laura Beckwith, Margaret Burnett, Susan Wiedenbeck, Curtis Cook, Shraddha Sorte, Michelle Hastings, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, Oregon, April 2005, 869-878.
(Doctoral Consortuim Event) "Gender HCI Issues in Problem-Solving Software", Laura Beckwith, ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, Oregon, April 2005, 1104-1105.
Gender: An Important Factor in End-User Programming Environments? Laura Beckwith and Margaret Burnett. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing Languages and Environments, Rome, Italy, Sept. 2004.

Related Resources

National Center for Women in Technology (NCWIT): a great collection of resources on many aspects of gender and technology.
Gender HCI Publications Resource for those interested in Gender HCI research.
Girls Tech - Girls, Science, and Technology
Wikipedia Entry on Gender HCI.

Sponsors & Partners

National Science Foundation (grants #0420533, 0917366)
Microsoft Research supported Laura Beckwith's PhD research 2004-2006. A later portion of this work was done during Margaret Burnett's 2009 sabbatical at Microsoft Research.
A Saturday Academy high school student researcher will be working with us every summer on this project.

Date of last update: Feb. 21, 2012