Do you think people assume that men are better equipped to use computers than women?

A study by three universities on UK school pupils suggests that girls would be just as good as boys at computing if the software were made 'gender neutral'.

The children were first set a reasoning problem in the form of an adventure game. It involved stereotypically male features like kings, pirates, ships and planes. The boys performed significantly better than the girls did.

Then the children were given the same task with different characters. 'Honeybears', ponies and balloons inspired the girls to improve their performance dramatically, even creeping in front of the boys' result.

Studies are now going to be carried out on university students to see if the gender issue is just as prominent as with school children.

Is software created by men for men, or do you think men just pick up technical skills faster than women?

Bournemouth University's Professor Paul Light thinks everyone, including children now expect boys to be better with computers - so they are.

He says that while there is no evidence of 'real' gender differences, girls may often approach computer tasks with lower expectations of success than boys.

Researchers say the results of this study stand as a caution to all who develop software for children - the imagery that is used can have a serious influence out of all proportion to its significance to the designer.

What do you think?

Is IT a man's world?

Your reaction in full

Back to top | BBC News Home | BBC Homepage | ©