Researchers study software gender gap

She started by asking a group of women and men, in a questionnaire, whether they believed they could find and fix errors in spreadsheets filled with formulas.

Then, she sat them down in front of a computer with two spreadsheets. One tracked students' grades, and another calculated employees' paychecks.

Beckwith buried five errors in each one without telling the participants. She gave them a time limit and asked them to test all the formulas and fix any bugs.

The program included a debugging feature that helped the users spot miscalculations by the formulas underlying the spreadsheet and other errors. When they clicked on a number that seemed wrong — a grade point average that looked too low, given the student's test scores, for example — cells in the spreadsheet grid that contained the possible source of the error changed color. If the participants were sure a formula or value was correct, they could check it off.

In this experiment, the key to success was using the debugging feature. Both men and women who used it were better at finding and fixing the bugs.

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.

Beckwith was faced with a conundrum. From questionnaires handed out after the experiment, she knew women understood how the debugging tools were supposed to work, so it seemed their confidence level was lower than it deserved to be. She also knew that one way to boost confidence is through successful experiences. But it was this low confidence that was keeping women from using the debugging tool and having a successful experience.

As a computer scientist, Beckwith wasn't interested in changing women's confidence levels. She was interested in whether changing the software could help women over this hurdle.

So she explored whether a gentler presentation of the debugging tool, one that seemed to require less confidence, would appeal to women.

In the first study, the debugging tool let users mark values "right" or "wrong." To mark something as wrong, participants had to right-click with the mouse.

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.

Beckwith tested the new feature during several other experiments. When she tallied up the numbers, she found that in some experiments, women used some form of the debugging feature almost as often as men did. In others, they used the debugging tools even more than men did.

Although these experiments homed in on a tiny aspect of a computer user's life — debugging spreadsheets — the implications could be quite large.

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