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Women and debugging
An interesting take on women and computer science is discussed in a recent AP article by Jessica Mintz. Buried towards the end of the article is the shocking statistic (which we have mentioned before) that the percentage of women computer science majors has been steadily decreasing: in 1985, women received 37 percent of CS bachelor’s degrees, but in 2005 the number was only 22 percent.
In an interesting spin on this decline, the article discusses research by Laura Beckwith and Margaret Burnett on the relationship between confidence and the use of debugging tools. Sounds dry, right? But it turns out that the results of the research inspired changes to the software that dramatically changed how women interact with it.
The experiment: men and women were asked to debug a spreadsheet that contained errors in its formulas. The researchers tracked whether or not the participants used debugging tools to analyze the spreadsheet; they also used a questionnaire to study the participants’ confidence in the task. Not surprisingly, the women were less confident, and they also used the debugger less - and therefore were less successful at the task.
The level of confidence expressed by the participants in the questionnaire about debugging, however, played a much different role for the genders. For men, it didn’t really matter whether they believed they could complete the task. Some men with low confidence used the debugging tools, and some with high confidence didn’t. But for the women, only those who believed they could do the task successfully used the automated debugging tools. The women with lower confidence in the task relied instead on what they knew — editing formulas one by one — and ended up introducing more bugs than when they started.
But then Beckwith had an inspired idea. She altered the debugger to allow “maybe” answers, thinking this might enable use of the tool by less confident participants.
In later studies, Beckwith added two more choices: “seems right maybe” and “seems wrong maybe.” The “maybe” buttons worked just like the more certain-seeming ones, but used softer colors to indicate possible errors. She also changed the program so that no one needed to right-click the mouse, something less-experienced computer users are reluctant to do.
This change altered the experiments. Women started using the debugging features as much as the men. This work suggests that more research and software design focused on how women use computers could play an important role in improving women’s participation in computer science. As Burnett says,
“The first time you as a girl sit down at a computer to do some real problem solving,” Burnett said, “and the software you’re using isn’t a good fit for your learning style, your problem solving style, how likely are you to be to say, `I’m going to grow up and be a computer scientist?’”