Gender HCI Project
What if females would be better 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.
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.
News
September 24, 2007
An AP story was recently released on Laura Beckwith's, Margaret Burnett's, and Susan Wiedenbeck's Gender HCI work, and has been picked up by numerous news feeds.
Publications
- 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.
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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
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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.
People
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Margaret Burnett: Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University
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Curtis Cook: Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Oregon State University
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Susan Wiedenbeck: College of Information Science and Technology Professor, Drexel University
- Xiaoli Fern: Assistant Professor, Oregon State University
- Carlos Jensen: 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: Microsoft
- Neeraja Subrahmaniyan: Microsoft
- Vaishnavi Narayanan: Microsoft
- Jill Cao: PhD Student, Oregon State University
- Valentina Grigoreanu: MS Student, Oregon State University
- Todd Kulesza: 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
- Akshay Subramanian: Saturday Academy High School Intern '08 at Oregon State University
- Rachel White: Saturday Academy High School Intern '08 at 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
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.
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