Software engineering education — Does gender matter in project results? — A Chilean case study

Abstract

Teaching software engineering in a practical course in academia is considered one of the best strategies to help students understand what they will face in industry. Teamwork, coordination, communication are soft skills that are demanded in real life, but how to improve these courses to be more effective and yield better results is not clear. Software engineering - as with most computer careers - is known to be short on women, but the participation of women improves diversity to student teams. Women may have personal characteristics that are different from the ones we normally see among male software engineering students. Do, mixed gender software teams have better project results than one-gender teams? After assisting software engineering courses for four years, I observed mixed gender teams to be better. With this idea in mind I performed a case study where I analyzed the behavior and the results of software projects over nine semesters. The obtained results show that mixed gender teams were more effective and coordinated.