Hello, everyone.
I'm happy to present our paper titled "Gender Differences
in Graphic Design Q&As: How Community and Site
Characteristics Contribute to Gender Gaps in Answering
Questions."
Complex software, like Photoshop,
have many commands that make learning them challenging.
Someone learning such software has access
to many online resources, often created
by communities of users.
For example, Stock Exchange and Quora
are question and answer sites about many different topics,
including complex software.
But there are hundreds of other resources
that somebody could use.
Unity authored resources have obvious benefits for donors,
but people providing content for these resources
also benefit from several advantages.
For example, these communities can serve as platforms
to showcase skills and offer informal networking
opportunities.
As researchers, we have built and studied many systems
assisting knowledge contributors.
However, we realize that we don't
know who exactly are the people that share
software knowledge, if they are well well-supported,
and how existing support affects contributed content.
We start this investigation by looking
at one characteristic gender.
We know that gender imbalances affect other online communities
in terms of membership and content.
So, given the opportunities that knowledge contributors have,
it's important that both men and women are given the chance
to participate.
We ask the questions, are there gender imbalances in software
knowledge sharing communities?
And what are the effects of such imbalances?
Our first step was to pick a field to study.
We picked graphic design for the following reasons.
First there are many popular graphic design software,
which means there is a diverse pool of data
that can be studied.
We also found that gender ratios in the field and the degree it
is technical can affect participation
of men and women--
something that can be seen in programming communities,
for example.
On the other hand, graphic design
has a fairly similar number of men and women practitioners,
and has both technical and non-technical knowledge.
So we set about studying gender differences
in online graphic design communities using two studies.
For our first study, we analyzed knowledge content
about learning Photoshop, probably
the most well-known graphic design software,
to see if there are any differences in content
submitted by men and women.
We analyzed over 340 contributions total
along various metrics.
We then interviewed 11 women and 13 men
graphic designers who use and contribute
to learning resources.
From these interviews, we learned
about perceived motivations and barriers
to participation by these graphic designers.
For these studies, we chose to focus on two popular websites,
Quora and Stock Exchange.
We decided to study two websites to see if different community
dynamics and standards affect participation
and perceptions by gender.
Unsurprisingly, women contributed less often
than men, but the difference between genders
was less large on Quora than on Stock Exchange.
We tried to understand why and found
that men and women have different perceptions of what
is useful software knowledge.
Here are two results that support this finding.
Quora's policies seem to be more accepting of opinions than
Stock Exchange's.
And we did see more opinions on Quora.
Our interview participants also said
that Quora is more suitable for sharing perspectives.
We therefore wonder if opinions are a type of knowledge that
are highly valued by women, and if that is why they participate
more often on Quora.
Women in our interviews also express the fact
that both communities lack social features.
Previous work supports the idea that social environment
is very important when women share knowledge and learn.
To summarize, even within a single domain,
websites have an impact on gender differences.
This is why the CSCW and HCI communities
should study different websites to understand
how design decisions and cultures can
appear to men and women.
For example, we speculated that women strongly value opinions,
so finding ways to better share and value
opinions in software knowledge communities
could encourage participation.
One reason to study graphic design
was for having a similar number of men and women practitioners,
but there are other reasons for a gender gap.
We should also consider the effects of gender imbalances
with other factors such as wages, level of education,
and the number of people in leadership positions.
Overall, we show the need for HCI and CSCW
to further and to continue considering gender
when developing and researching software learning communities.
There are many exciting opportunities
for working towards more gender inclusive technologies.