A human-centric issue that has not been considered in the design of end-user programming environments is whether gender differences exist that are important to the design of these environments. Ignoring this issue would miss the opportunity of enhancing the effectiveness of end-user programmers by incorporating appropriate mechanisms to support gender-associated differences in decision making, learning, and problem solving. This paper takes a first step toward building a foundation for investigating this issue by surveying gender difference literature from five domains with an eye toward possible implications for end-user programming. We present a taxonomy of this literature, and derive a number of specific issues for each element of the taxonomy (stated as hypotheses). This foundation provides a starting point for organized investigations into issues that may be important for making breakthroughs in the effectiveness of end-user programmers.

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—but the possibility of gender issues within software has received almost no attention. If gender issues exist with some types of software features, it is possible that accommodating them by changing these features can increase effectiveness, but only if we know what these issues are. In this paper, we empirically investigate gender differences for end users in the context of debugging spreadsheets. Our results uncover significant gender differences in self-efficacy and feature acceptance, with females exhibiting lower self-efficacy and lower feature acceptance. The results also show that these differences can significantly reduce females ’ effectiveness.

Abstract. Little research has addressed IT professionals ’ script debugging strategies, or considered whether there may be gender differences in these strategies. What strategies do male and female scripters use and what kinds of mechanisms do they employ to successfully fix bugs? Also, are scripters’ debugging strategies similar to or different from those of spreadsheet debuggers? Without the answers to these questions, tool designers do not have a target to aim at for supporting how male and female scripters want to go about debugging. We conducted a think-aloud study to bridge this gap. Our results include (1) a generalized understanding of debugging strategies used by spreadsheet users and scripters, (2) identification of the multiple mechanisms scripters employed to carry out the strategies, and (3) detailed examples of how these debugging strategies were employed by males and females to successfully fix bugs.

Among the many characteristics that impact the use of e-commerce, one that has received relatively little attention is gender. Extant evidence suggests that men and women differ in their beliefs regarding the use of information technology-related innovations, including e-commerce. However, less is known about how gender moderates the impact of various beliefs on behavioral intentions. In this study, we use a model derived from diffusion of innovations theory to examine gender differences in the degree to which various beliefs regarding e-commerce impact intentions to make purchases online. Results indicate that gender does moderate the influence of beliefs on use intentions in the context of consumer e-commerce. Specifically, our study finds that relative advantage is relatively more important for men and that compatibility is relatively more important for women. We explain why this may be true, discuss the implications of these findings and

Previous research has revealed gender differences that impact females’ willingness to adopt software features in end users ’ programming environments. Since these features have separately been shown to help end users problem solve, it is important to female end users ’ productivity that we find ways to make these features more acceptable to females. This thesis draws from our ongoing work with users to help inform our design of theory-based methods for encouraging effective feature usage by both genders. This design effort is the first to begin addressing the gender differences in the ways that people go about problem solving in end-user programming situations. ©Copyright by Shraddha R. Sorte