[marquis]

I think, and I really am generalizing here based on experience, that girls/women less mind doing a task that doesn't directly benefit them. It may also be that girls don't mind being perceived as bossy? Management often dictates that you ask others in your group to complete tasks within a timeframe and girls may already be prepared for this (going into difficult territory here) by learning from their mothers run a household.

[irahul]

> girls/women less mind doing a task that doesn't directly benefit them.

I don't follow. Are you saying documentation doesn't benefit the assignee directly and coding does?

> Management often dictates that you ask others in your group to complete tasks within a timeframe and girls may already be prepared for this

We have different definitions of initiative here(I am putting words in your mouth. You said girls are more likely to take tasks which needs to be done and I am calling it initiative). Initiative for me is there is a task which needs to be done and no one wants to do it because it's difficult or unpleasant, and you voluntarily do it.

Asking others that it gets done, provided you have the authority to do so, isn't actually initiative. Authority is defined loosely here. Consider I am working with 3 people and I have done most of the coding. I will ask the other two to get the documentation done, even though we are peers.

My original question was more on the lines of if you are working on a regular programming project, and a module requires more work than the others, who was more likely to pick it?

[marquis]

> Are you saying documentation doesn't benefit the assignee directly and coding does?

Yes, in our current culture of software development. Perhaps less so in academic culture, and certainly not in literary culture. But in software development documentation is not seen as a glamorous task, even though we all know that good documentation makes for a better product.

>Asking others that it gets done, provided you have the authority to do so, isn't actually initiative

Sure, I agree with you.

>I will ask the other two to get the documentation done, even though we are peers.

What if this was an open source project? Or a school project, or any project where you weren't reimbursed somehow. I like to look to these examples to see how a 'natural' system would develop, because it's too easy to place false systems on a business structure where you use payment to get people do what you want. If you can use a naturally-occuring system, it would seem that any project model would then thrive naturally. Hope I am making sense here.

>if you are working on a regular programming project, and a module requires more work than the others, who was more likely to pick it?

Well, that depends on the project goals, and I'd be making too many (more) assumptions here if I were to give examples of what I thought might happen in theory. Ultimately it's up to the individual.