Over the last five years or so, I've assembled various pages of useful links on my Web site related to matters that interest me and that I thought would interest others. There's a menu to these resource links here and here.

A subset of these is a large page of general resources for IT professionals -- for the IT consultant, contractor, marketeer, reseller, CIO, IT manager, architect, project manager, administrator. There are many topics, including résumé writing, job prospects, outsourcing, ethics, and lots more. You'll find it here or here, with a "quick links" section at the top to help you find your way to the topics. (Sorry, I simply have neither the time nor the resolve to break it down into more digestible chunks!)

There are links for "the glass ceiling" and sexism here and here, as well as links for ageism and the mature IT professional here and here.

I was moved to pen this article because I've just stumbled upon a fascinating set of papers by Laura Beckwith and colleagues. These papers address the question of whether the design of end-user programming environments, such as spreadsheets, multimedia authoring languages, and CAD systems, affects males and females differently.

You can view the abstracts and download the papers in PDF format from these places:

• Gender HCI Issues in End-User Programming (where HCI stands for Human-Computer Interface)
• Gender Differences in End-User Debugging Strategies
• Gender: An Important Factor in End-User Programming Environments?
• Effectiveness of End-User Debugging Software Features: Are There Gender Issues?
• On to the Real World: Gender and Self-Efficacy in Excel
• Supporting End-User Debugging: What Do Users Want to Know?

The authors conclude, amongst other things: "Although researchers have begun to explicitly support end-user programmers’ debugging by providing information to help them find bugs, there is little research addressing the right content to communicate to these users. The specific semantic content of these debugging communications matters because, if the users are not actually seeking the information the system is providing, they are not likely to attend to it."

And: "Our results indicate that males and females debug in quite different ways, that there are considerable opportunities for improving support for end-user debugging strategies for both genders, and that the types of features commonly found to aid debugging may be especially deficient in supporting strategies the females prefer to use in debugging."

The researchers were mostly females, so presumably there was little or no anti-female bias.

Intriguing, eh? So go read those papers!

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