Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender imbalance in information technology area. To accomplish this, it is important to suppress the influence of biases, such as the belief that men are more suited for careers in science and technology than women, and to increase the choice of careers available to female professionals. To help suppress the influence of gender bias, we analyzed the relationship between gender and code reading speed in the field of software development. Certain source codes require developers to use substantial memory to properly understand them, such as those with many variables that frequently change values. Several studies have indicated that the performance of memory differs in males and females. To test the veracity of this claim, we analyzed the influence of gender on code-reading speed through an experiment. Pursuant to this, we prepared four programs that required varied amounts of memory to properly understand them. Then, we measured the time required by each of the 17 male and 16 female subjects (33 subjects in total) to comprehend the different programs. The results suggest that there is no explicit difference between male and female subjects in this regard, even in the case of programs that require high memory capacities for proper understanding.
翻译:最近,劳动力短缺已成为信息技术(IT)中一个普遍的问题。增加劳动力供应的一个解决办法是增加女性信息技术专业人员的人数。这是因为信息技术领域存在性别不平衡现象。为了做到这一点,必须抑制偏见的影响,例如认为男性更适合从事科学和技术职业,而不是妇女,并增加女性专业人员可以选择的职业。为了帮助抑制性别偏见的影响,我们分析了软件开发领域的性别与代码阅读速度之间的关系。某些源代码要求开发商使用大量记忆来正确理解他们,例如经常改变价值的变量很多。一些研究表明,男女的记忆性能存在差异。为了检验这一说法的真实性,我们通过实验分析了性别对代码阅读速度的影响。据此,我们编写了四个方案,需要不同的记忆量才能正确理解它们。然后,我们测量了17个男性和16个女性科目(总共33个科目)中每一个科目(总共33个)所需要的时间,以了解不同的程序。结果显示,男女的记忆性能没有明显差别,即使在这方面需要高的记忆能力。