How to Get Started

We can come to your site to run training workshops for your company. We can also offer individual support and virtual training sessions.

To set up a training session email us at gendermag.method@gmail.com

Course Summary

Learn GenderMag, a unique method to find and fix gender-inclusiveness bugs in your software. Gender biases are pervasive in software's "front end", and can affect your product's inclusiveness, equity, and market share. These barriers tend to affect more women than others, but can affect people of any gender.

The GenderMag method (Gender Inclusiveness Magnifier) is a software inspection method to enable software industry professionals to pinpoint gender-inclusiveness "bugs"—and fix them. Companies who have used the method have found that the method not only makes their products more gender-inclusive, but that users of all genders can use their products more effectively. For example, using it on one product completely eliminated a gender bias in usability, and improved usability for everyone.

This hands-on course will teach you how to use this method to improve your organization's software and other IT.

Who Should Take This Course

This course is for software designers, product managers, and anyone who creates, builds, tests, or otherwise influences the IT or software produced by your organization. User experience professionals, IT professionals, software developers, software project managers, software policy makers, and CIOs, are all appropriate audiences for this material.

In this highly interactive course, attendees are strongly encouraged to bring their own IT projects (whether working products, design-mockups, web pages, etc.), so that you can begin to "de-bias" your own designs during the course. We will also provide a freely-downloadable mockup example of a software product, which you can de-bias instead of your own, for those who don't bring their own project.

Why Take This Course

After completion of this course, you will be able to bring the following skills and perspectives back your daily work:

  • Find and fix gender-inclusiveness bugs in your software products.
  • Design for gender-inclusiveness in your software.
  • How to earn an iGIANT Seal of Approval (Level 1) for your organization's technology. (We can help you apply for this certification during the course.)

Instructors

Margaret Burnett
Distinguished Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University
Learn More...

Margaret Burnett is a Distinguished Professor at Oregon State University. Her research on gender inclusiveness in software-especially in software tools for programming and problem-solving-spans over 15 years. This work produced the GenderMag method, now in use in 32 countries. Burnett regularly presents research on gender-inclusive software and speaks on this topic in companies, universities, and conferences around the world. She is an ACM Distinguished Speaker, an ACM Fellow, a member of the ACM CHI Academy, and serves on the Academic Alliance Advisory Board of the U.S. National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT). http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/

Anita Sarma
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Oregon State University
Learn More...

Anita Sarma is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Oregon State University and is co-director of the GenderMag project. Her research focuses on understanding how diverse humans think when they work with software, and designing software that supports their diverse cognitive styles. Sarma's passion is in fixing tools and processes to match how people think so as to make the people more productive, and not the other way round. She leads a new research project supported by a National Science Foundation on how to create gender-inclusive software. She regularly speaks on this topic in companies, universities, and conferences around the world. http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~sarmaa/