Having read the abstract of Laura Beckwith's PhD dissertation, I'm getting a bad mood. Beckwith and her adviser, Margaret Burnett (Oregon State University) were interested in the question for a possible key to make computer science (and the CS industry) more attractive for women. One of their tasks was to analyze how people use computers to solve problems. One of their results is that men are more likely to use advanced software features than women, indepent from their confidence in computer skills. Their experimentees had to find out bugs in various formulas within a spreadsheet and were allowed to use a debugging feature that would help them in detecting the errors. Even unexperienced male users who were less confident in computer tasks used that advanced software feature more often than the female users. Even experienced femals users were unlikely to use that debugger. The only way to raise the number of women in this setting was to add some more options to the debugger. In its first version, the debugging tool let users mark values "right" or "wrong." For the next version Beckwith added options for "seems right maybe" and "seems wrong maybe," and suddenly some tests had more female debugging users than male ones.

This is plain depressing. Does software really need "pink buttons"? What's wrong in saying "1" or "0"? Will "Excel for Women" become a reality and a joke for "real" users?

Beckwith's dissertation is available online.

I would be interested in a comparable study in different cultural circles, where women aren't that shy with math: Israel, India, Iran to name a few. Anyone? (Source)