Can feature design reduce the gender gap in end-user software development environments?

Abstract

Recent research has begun to report that female enduser programmers are often more reluctant than males to employ features that are useful for testing and debugging. These earlier findings suggest that, unless such features can be changed in some appropriate way, there are likely to be important gender differences in end-user programmers' benefits from these features. In this paper, we compare end-user programmers' feature usage in an environment that supports end-user debugging, against an extension of the same environment with two features designed to help ameliorate the effects of low self-efficacy. Our results show ways in which these features affect female versus male enduser programmers' self-efficacy, attitudes, usage of testing and debugging features, and performance. © 2008 IEEE.