Feminine Expertise in Architecting Teams
Maryam Razavian, Patricia Lago · IEEE Software · 2015
A well-known adage is "diversity brings innovation." Diversity can be in culture, thinking, discipline, gender, and many more aspects. The result is the same: the chances for creating innovation in a given context increase when diversity is involved. To some extent, this principle should also hold for gender diversity in software teams. Achieving gender diversity in IT-related fields has been a goal for decades, but still, too few women choose such a career. But what skills or traits assigned to the feminine role bring concrete advantages to software teams? Researchers addressed this important and, strangely enough, mostly unexplored problem, specifically for software-architecting teams. They interviewed male and female software architects at four major IT companies in the Netherlands and then interviewed a panel of experts. They identified seven feminine expertise "flavors"--traits and skills linked to the feminine role in architecting teams. Much of such expertise relates to the skills required to successfully deal with software architecting's human aspects.