IIG

New occupational potential for women in software development

For over 30 years, the software crisis has been discussed within the field of computer science. The discussion covers topics such as: the endless number of software development projects, which have already begun, the inability to implement software, the high maintenance costs and user-unfriendly handling. Software is often developed without considering the needs of users or the implementation of software in the working process. These problems are to be solved through software engineering, a discipline that creates methods and tools for the software development process. However, software engineering has brought only partial improvement, because the shortcomings of software cannot merely be attributed to incorrect programming or algorithmic mistakes. Most problems are due to an inadequate working structure in software development. Nowadays, software development is understood more to be a process of learning, communication and negotiation. This requires a high level of co-operation and communication skills on the part of software developers. Women in particular are thought to have these skills, since such skills are a part of the female socialisation process.

Our project screened two aspects of this assumption:

• Do specific female attitudes and strategies exist in software development?
• If so, do these strategies correspond to the new requirements in software development?

In qualitative interviews female and male software developers from small, medium-sized and large companies were asked about the way they work, their attitudes and their dominant strategic concepts.

To begin, the results show that women and men share many similarities in their non-technical working skills. Significant differences were found, however, in their attitudes towards certain areas of software development. During the stage in which requirements are defined, women more often imagine themselves in the position of users. They give consideration to user participation and all the problems connected with it as a normal part of their work. Women consider the user not as a novice, but as an equal partner-one who contributes to the success of the product. Men, in contrast, tend to think more in categories of experts and lay people. Men as well as women judge the ability to work in a team and communication skills as very important for their job. But female software developers are characterised by their ability to listen actively, which enables them to realise user proposals. In this aspect, male software developers show less readiness to compromise.

To simplify, we could say that male software developers are generally more oriented toward technical aspects, whereas female software developers are more oriented toward application and the users. Different studies have shown that the attitudes of software developers determine the design of a product. It has yet to be proven if and to what extent this is relevant to the differences we found.

Some of the results of this project have been presented in a workshop (german only).