Why You Need Female Testers on Your Team

By: Joseph Ours

Summary:
There is a great deal of conversation around the lack of female representation in Silicon Valley. While striving for more equal demographics within the IT world is a worthy cause in its own right, it is actually to our industry’s detriment when we fail to actively include women on testing teams. Read on to learn why.

There is a great deal of conversation around the lack of female representation in Silicon Valley. While striving for more equal demographics within the IT world is a worthy cause in its own right, it is actually to our industry’s detriment when we fail to actively include women on testing teams. Thomas Jefferson once said, “Difference of opinion leads to enquiry, and enquiry to truth . . . .” Women’s typical cognitive differences make them invaluable to our testing teams.

First and foremost, cognitive differences are not an indication that one gender is more intelligent than another. Cognitive differences, in this case, just means that genders see the world differently. It is this perception in a few key areas that makes it imperative that teams include both men and women.

Verbal Episodic Memory Tasks
Verbal episodic memory is the personal memory of events, places, times, emotions, and context based on language. Women tend to be more adept than men at verbal episodic memory tasks such as remembering words, objects, pictures, and other everyday events with descriptive language. These skills permeate the testing lifecycle, whether it is remembering conversations about clarifying requirements or recalling details of a defect found during test execution.

Women’s general ability to remember details better stems from their utilization of both sides of their brains when paying attention. Note that this is not the same as multitasking. Using language skills from both sides of their brains allows women to take in, decipher, and contextualize more information from a given situation than men can.

Another difference is that women may need more words to understand a given context and tend to use more words when describing events, while men tend to need fewer words to understand a given context and use fewer words when describing events. For example, if a man and a woman were each trying to get people to guess the name of the book Moby Dick without using its title, the woman might say, “Call me Ishmael” and the man may more concisely say, “Ahab.”

Visuospatial Episodic Memory Tasks

Visuospatial episodic memory is the memory of events, places, times, emotions, and context based on the relationship of items in those memories to each other. Men tend to be more adept than women at remembering and describing events visuospatially. This is due primarily to men’s usage of only one brain hemisphere when focusing on events.

There are two main advantages to this approach. One is it enables men to focus more intently for longer periods of time. This was most likely developed as a result of men needing to maintain focus to hunt successfully. Secondly, men tend to have the advantage when relating one aspect of technology to another. In testing, there are times when intense focus and understanding of relationships is needed, such as when decomposing requirements, executing tests, or troubleshooting.

Gender-Induced Disagreement

Quite a few disagreements between genders can be attributed to or exacerbated by these cognitive differences. Women may want to discuss a multitude of topics in a given conversation, whereas men might only want to focus on a single topic at a time. This can cause women to view men as being stubborn while causing men to see women as unfocused.

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