Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by wsy 2384 days ago
Your examples are not related to software engineering. Please name software engineering related biological differences between men and women, backed by solid scientific studies.
1 comments

Do we even have a scientifically-backed set of essential biological or cognitive skills related to software engineering?

I would probably start with [1] and [2].

Paper [3] concludes that sex-based differences in risk tolerance tangibly impacted approaches to spatial navigation AND program development.

There's a few others on spatial cognition and mental information processing: [4][5][6]. Paper[5] in particular links spatial cognition to mental modeling, which was identified in [1] as a software engineering skill. And [6] directly connects it to navigating source code.

[1]https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/eafe/74dddaf7ada62a52a2e712...

[2]https://web.stanford.edu/~roypea/RoyPDF%20folder/A17_Pea_Kur...

[3]https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/4021352

[4]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03601...

[5]https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2729....

[6]https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1268852

[1] and [2] are not studies. [2] isn't even peer reviewed.

[3] is behind a paywall. It appeared in the "2006 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance", which is a pretty good indicator that this is not work done by social scientists, i.e., not scientifically backed. I have worked in science, the good papers appear in journals highly relevant for the topic.

[4] and [5] are not about software engineering.

[6] is also behind a paywall, and is based on a study with 24 students.

As I can't access the full-text papers, what is the reported strength of the effect, i.e., if person A is x% better than person B in spatial recognition, how much better is A in software engineering?

edit: here is a study presenting evidence that spatial skill differences in gender are not biological, see https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2013-38414-001. Without paywall: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mike_Stieff/publication...