Gender differences in the design of personal websites

: application to an academic context

Abstract

Many investigations have been conducted so far in order to determine differences existing between men and women. Research topics have been focusing on psychology, social behavior, cognitive skills and so on. Computer science has not been omitted. Research on gender differences targets topics such as Internet use, computer games, design of learning environments, virtual reality, online communication, e-commerce, gender gap in computer science and so on. However, surprisingly, very few studies have been conducted on gender differences in web design. The few existing investigations were carried out by sociologists who focussed on specific differences, that is to say psychological differences (daring to put one’s picture on one’s site and so on). More general features such as the number of pages, words, the fonts etc have not been given any particular attention so far. The aim of this thesis is thus to give an answer to the following question: can we find a male way and a female way of designing? To carry out the analysis, several male and female professors’ web homepages have been assessed on the basis of a couple of features. Those professors have been chosen among different Australian universities. Nevertheless, a qualitative analysis had to be conducted as well. To achieve that goal, a survey has been carried out among students of a web design class. They have been questionned about their preferences in web design. We will then be able to compare our results with those from previous research.

Date of Award	2005
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Namur
Supervisor	Monique Fraiture (Supervisor)