The answer to this question is fairly simple: women make good software testers if they’re good at testing. And so do men. There would be no reason to go into this any further if it weren’t for the occasional blog posts that pop out here and there, carrying headlines like ‘Are women better testers than men?’ or ‘Is software testing women’s work?’ (if you don’t believe that, go ahead and ask Google!). We are aware that this is a tricky topic, and bringing it up usually seems to imply that sexism and discrimination are just around the corner. But instead of jumping right at it and listing possible skills that may or may not make women better testers (who hasn’t heard of ‘multi-tasking’, ‘emotional intelligence’ or ‘an eye for detail’?), we’d rather tell you about our own experiences.
At Xceptance we just think our team is great the way it is. There are women and there are men, and everyone contributes to the company’s success in their own way. Our employees do a great job listening to customer requests, they passionately discuss appropriate testing strategies and they sometimes make phone calls while simultaneously updating browser versions on testing devices and formatting the latest bug report. Some of our employees love snowboarding in their free time while others like cooking and crafts, and we can assure you that there is nothing gender-related about all that. So if there are more women than men in software testing, that’s great! But it doesn’t mean anything besides those bare statistics.
Of course now you could ask: if gender doesn’t matter, why make a blog post of it? Admittedly, that is a good question. But with all those articles out there about women in software testing and the accompanying stereotypes we just felt like we’d have to take a stand and outline our own opinion. We’re not big fans of the ‘you say it best when you say nothing at all’ attitude, so we figured we could as well go for it. And with all of the above being said, there’s just one thing we have to confess: every year on March 8th all of our female employees receive a chocolate treat in honor of International Women’s Day.
Photo by kevinshine under CC-BY-2.0.