An empirical investigation of Bangladeshi websites from a gender perspective

Abstract

Gender inclusiveness in computing settings is receiving a lot of attention, but one potentially critical factor has mostly been overlooked: Websites. In this paper, we present the investigation which is a multiple case eld study of two websites of di er- ent categories through experimental lab study and user surveys. We also investigate to understand if there is a psychological di erence when it comes to self-e cacy, processing of information and tinkering between both genders. Our experimental result has shown signi cant di erence in the Self-e cacy where males are seen to be more con dent while working in computing settings than females. Using the ANOVA Calculator the p-value of self-e cacy is 0.000085 which is signi cant at p<0.01. Also, we tested the tinkering tendencies of males and females, the e ect of which was a negative correlation between Tinkering and Time Taken to nish the tasks on BRAC University website, the Pearson value was -0.729. The Fisher Exact Test value, 0.0911 is greater than 0.05, showing a signi cant di erence between the Tinkering of males and females. Furthermore, while processing information, males and females are known to follow di erent approaches. It is found that, partici- pants' task success had a positive correlation with Selective Information processing in BRAC University website, with a Pearson value of 0.658. The overall task com- pletion rate of female participants is 44.65 percent and that of male participants is 66.05 percent, on the selected websites showing a notable di erence. Hence, our empirical investigation proposes the relevance of accounting for gender di erences when it comes to building websites, softwares or any Information Technology(IT) systems, which has not been considered yet in Bangladesh.