Why You Need Female Testers on Your Team

[article]
Summary:

There is a great deal of conversation around the lack of female representation in Silicon Valley. While striving for more equal demographics within the IT world is a worthy cause in its own right, it is actually to our industry’s detriment when we fail to actively include women on testing teams. Read on to learn why.

There is a great deal of conversation around the lack of female representation in Silicon Valley. While striving for more equal demographics within the IT world is a worthy cause in its own right, it is actually to our industry’s detriment when we fail to actively include women on testing teams. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth . . . .” Women’s typical cognitive differences make them invaluable to our testing teams.

First and foremost, cognitive differences are not an indication that one gender is more intelligent than another. Cognitive differences, in this case, just means that genders see the world differently. It is this perception in a few key areas that makes it imperative that teams include both men and women.

Verbal Episodic Memory Tasks

Verbal episodic memory is the personal memory of events, places, times, emotions, and context based on language. Women tend to be more adept than men at verbal episodic memory tasks such as remembering words, objects, pictures, and other everyday events with descriptive language. These skills permeate the testing lifecycle, whether it is remembering conversations about clarifying requirements or recalling details of a defect found during test execution.

Women’s general ability to remember details better stems from their utilization of both sides of their brains when paying attention. Note that this is not the same as multitasking. Using language skills from both sides of their brains allows women to take in, decipher, and contextualize more information from a given situation than men can.

Another difference is that women may need more words to understand a given context and tend to use more words when describing events, while men tend to need fewer words to understand a given context and use fewer words when describing events. For example, if a man and a woman were each trying to get people to guess the name of the book Moby Dick without using its title, the woman might say, “Call me Ishmael” and the man may more concisely say, “Ahab.”

Visuospatial Episodic Memory Tasks

Visuospatial episodic memory is the memory of events, places, times, emotions, and context based on the relationship of items in those memories to each other. Men tend to be more adept than women at remembering and describing events visuospatially. This is due primarily to men’s usage of only one brain hemisphere when focusing on events.

There are two main advantages to this approach. One is it enables men to focus more intently for longer periods of time. This was most likely developed as a result of men needing to maintain focus to hunt successfully. Secondly, men tend to have the advantage when relating one aspect of technology to another. In testing, there are times when intense focus and understanding of relationships is needed, such as when decomposing requirements, executing tests, or troubleshooting.

Gender-Induced Disagreement

Quite a few disagreements between genders can be attributed to or exacerbated by these cognitive differences. Women may want to discuss a multitude of topics in a given conversation, whereas men might only want to focus on a single topic at a time. This can cause women to view men as being stubborn while causing men to see women as unfocused.

Additional challenges can occur when cognitive differences cause assumptions to put into play. Men want to jump to the point and begin a course of action immediately. Cognitively, their brains have already formulated an understanding of the topic and a plan. Women, on the other hand, generally want to discuss the topic and procedure thoroughly and ensure they are understood before embarking on a project. They know that more information needs to be communicated before understanding can be assumed. Having both genders understand these differences can help them communicate and work more effectively together.

Differences are Not Deficiencies

Society needs to understand that differences are not deficiencies—nor are they immutable. For example, it is often reported that boys do well in math while girls excel at reading and writing. In gender-neutral societies, with the same encouragement and lack of predisposition about unobtainability, girls and boys perform equally in these subjects.

Men and women can achieve the same result; they just cognitively get there differently. It is the same as women navigating via landmarks while men navigate via cardinal directions. Each method is viable, reliable, and achieves the same goal, but the process is different—not deficient. Gender differences are more pronounced on the context in which they were seen. In studies designed to eliminate gender norms, researchers demonstrated that gender roles and social context strongly determined a person's actions.

In the workplace, people conform to expectations of gender differences. Simply changing expectations of gender inequality can cause that phenomenon to evaporate.

Capitalize on Harmony

Teams need to understand, remember, and process details of events, conversations, and places. Teams also need the ability to juggle and switch between multiple unfinished tasks and to have a good understanding of systems, relationships, and requirements. Eliminating performance differences based on gender differences combined with equal encouragement will result in higher individual and team productivity. In essence, teams are better with deep involvement from both genders in a variety of tasks and hierarchical positions. From experience, I know we are all the better for it.

User Comments

8 comments
Robert Giffard's picture

Are you in favor of building teams based on gender based tendencies?  Shouldn't it be about the individual and their skills and not their gender?

I have been lucky enough work with, and learn from some truly brilliant women and what they brought to the team had little to do with gender based tendencies and everything to do with their individual strengths.

I agree with your premis but I believe it's more about diversity making a team stronger than about any gender based generalizations.

February 2, 2015 - 10:34pm
Pete Dean's picture

Please can you post an English translation?

February 3, 2015 - 4:01pm
msattler's picture

This article is decades behind. Surprised it was even published

February 4, 2015 - 10:09am
Joseph Ours's picture

Thanks for all who have read this article.  I appreciate the time you took to read and provide feedback.  

@Robert - I'm always in favor of building teams based on their skills.  The article is designed to point out that women and men have differing cognitive abilities based on genetics (and are more than just tendencies).  Those differences should be leveraged to make teams more successful.  To do so, people need to understand what those differences are.  I would point out that having diversity and leveraging diversity are 2 different actions with different results.  Leveraging diversity makes teams stronger, unlike just having diversity.  That where we need to go as an industry.

@Pete - I assume you mean an explanation in laymen's terms, but am not sure.  Will you clarify your request?

 

@msattler - I would argue that because embracing and leveraging diversity is still such an issue, especially in IT, that this article is still timely.  I used research that spans 2001-2014 - to help ensure the underlying science had ample time to be peer reviewed and tested before applying generalizations and thoughts to our own community.  I would welcome any dialog on any interpretation that is "decades newer" you may have to offer.

February 4, 2015 - 10:50am
msattler's picture

We need to embrace and leverage diversity. You seem to have been speaking from a male world when you stated the need for female testers. Possibly you need to add males to your mostly female testing team to get that diversity. Then the title might be, "Why You Need Male Testers on Your Team".

 

 

February 4, 2015 - 3:53pm
Joseph Ours's picture

My original title was "Why you need female testers on your team..but you need men too!"  However, the editors do what they do - it was pretty long.

February 4, 2015 - 5:26pm
Robert Giffard's picture

Agreed, simply having people on a team with differnt strengths doesn't guarantee anything.  The study referenced in the article you referenced  "Sex Differences in Episodic Memory" showed that the difference between mens and womens scores was very small.  So simply being female doesn't guarantee a that your better at verbal episodic memory tasks than all your male coworkers.  Assuming that it does would be gender-stereotyping.  

 

Here's a study that supports your original assertion (that we need female testers) but not your conclusions:

 

 "Mixed-sex settings can, in fact, increase cognitive performance as long as gender-stereotyping is prevented." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24923876

February 6, 2015 - 1:21am
John Carlton's picture

Priority should be given to software testing skills and not genders.

February 17, 2015 - 1:33am

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