On to the Real World: Gender and Self-Efficacy in Excel

Although there have been a number of studies of end-user software development tasks, few of them have considered gender issues for real end-user developers in real-world environments for end-user programming. In order to be trusted, the results of such laboratory studies must always be re-evaluated with fewer controls, more closely reflecting real-world conditions. Therefore, the research question in this paper is whether the results of a gender HCI controlled study generalize - to real-world end-user developers, in a real-world spreadsheet environment, using a real-world spreadsheet. Our findings are that the concepts revealed by the original laboratory study appear to be quite robust, being demonstrated in multiple ways in this real-world environment.