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Gender-Inclusive Design: Stereotypes and Bias in Web Interfaces

Sun, May 27, 12:30 to 13:45, Hilton Prague, Floor: LL, Congress Hall II - Exhibit Hall/Posters

Abstract

Since the advent of the web, people communicate with different online audiences on a daily basis---professors present educational material to students, sports teams update their fans, companies advertise their job postings. At the same time these audiences are becoming more diverse than ever, with increasing recognition that sites need to be inclusive. This paper examines how the visual choices communicators make in designing their online messages via websites impact the sense of ambient belonging, or the sense of belonging to a community or a culture, felt by users of such sites. We report results of an experiment, which presented two content-identical webpages for an introductory computer science course to college-aged participants. The sites differed only in aesthetic features such that one was perceived as masculine while the other was gender-neutral. Our results confirm that young women exposed to the masculine page are negatively affected, reporting significantly less ambient belonging, interest in the course and in studying computer science broadly. They also experience significantly more concern about others’ perception of their gender relative to young women exposed to the neutral page, while no similar effect is seen in young men. These results suggest that gender biases can be communicated through web design, highlighting the need for inclusive communication design for the web.

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