Gender HCI Project

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.

To date, there has been only a little research considering the possibility of gender HCI issues. We propose to investigate 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.

This page describes our Gender HCI project which is investigating these issues.

Publications

• 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.

People

• Margaret Burnett: Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University
• Curtis Cook: Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Oregon State University
• Susan Wiedenbeck: College of Information Science and Technology Professor, Drexel University
• Xiaoli Fern: Assistant Professor, Oregon State University
• Anna Corinne Hall: Director, Saturday Academy
• Simone Stumpf: Research Associate, Oregon State University
• Alan Blackwell: Senior Lecturer, University of Cambridge, UK


• Laura Beckwith: PhD Student, Oregon State University
• Valentina Grigoreanu: MS Student, Oregon State University
• Vaishnavi Narayanan: MS Student, Oregon State University
• Shraddha Sorte: MS 2006, Oregon State University
• Thippaya Chintakovid: PhD student, Drexel University


• Kyle Rector: Undergrad researcher and Tektronix Scholar, Oregon State University
• Derek Inman: Undergrad researcher, Oregon State University


• Michelle Hastings: Saturday Academy High School Intern '04 at Oregon State University
• Sienna Hiebert: Saturday Academy High School Intern '05 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

Related Resources

• 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 (grant #CNS 0420533)
• Microsoft Research Cambridge is supporting Laura Beckwith's work.
• A Saturday Academy high school student researcher will be working with us every summer on this project.