Gender, Performance, and Self-Efficacy: A Quasi-Experimental Field Study

ABSTRACT

With chronic labor shortages in STEM-related industries, much research has focused on how to get more women and minorities interested in STEM careers. The most recent studies seem to indicate that the actual gap in user performance between genders has narrowed, although women tend to have less self-efficacy. However, all these previous studies involved student subjects in an educational context. This research uses a quasi-experimental field study with actual managers to test whether there are differences between genders when performing a variety of tasks of differing complexity on different computing devices and whether there are differences in self-efficacy. Subjects’ performance was measured by question accuracy and time taken to complete a task, while self-efficacy was measured by self-assessed confidence. The results support recent studies indicating that the gender gap in performance is minimal in accuracy with no differences in time spent, while the gap in self-efficacy has remained.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender and performance
• gender and self-efficacy
• field experiment
• business intelligence
• BI
• performance