ABSTRACT

With chronic labor shortages in STEM-related industries, much research has focused on how to get more women and minorities interested in STEM careers. The most recent studies seem to indicate that the actual gap in user performance between genders has narrowed, although women tend to have less self-efficacy. However, all these previous studies involved student subjects in an educational context. This research uses a quasi-experimental field study with actual managers to test whether there are differences between genders when performing a variety of tasks of differing complexity on different computing devices and whether there are differences in self-efficacy. Subjects’ performance was measured by question accuracy and time taken to complete a task, while self-efficacy was measured by self-assessed confidence. The results support recent studies indicating that the gender gap in performance is minimal in accuracy with no differences in time spent, while the gap in self-efficacy has remained.

摘要

由于 STEM 相关行业的劳动力长期短缺，许多研究都集中在如何让更多女性和少数族裔对 STEM 职业感兴趣。最近的研究似乎表明，性别之间用户表现的实际差距已经缩小，尽管女性的自我效能感往往较低。然而，所有这些先前的研究都涉及教育背景下的学生科目。本研究通过与实际管理者进行的准实验实地研究，测试在不同的计算设备上执行各种复杂程度不同的任务时，性别之间是否存在差异，以及自我效能感是否存在差异。受试者的表现通过问题的准确性和完成任务所需的时间来衡量，而自我效能感通过自我评估的信心来衡量。