A Study of Gender Discussions in Mobile Apps
Mobile software apps (“apps”) are one of the prevailing digital technologies that our modern life heavily depends on. A key issue in the development of apps is how to design gender-inclusive apps. Apps that do not consider gender inclusion, diversity, and equality in their design can create barriers (e.g., excluding some of the users because of their gender) for their diverse users. While there have been some efforts to develop gender-inclusive apps, a lack of deep understanding regarding user perspectives on gender may prevent app developers and owners from identifying issues related to gender and proposing solutions for improvement. Users express many different opinions about apps in their reviews, from sharing their experiences, and reporting bugs, to requesting new features. In this study, we aim at unpacking gender discussions about apps from the user perspective by analysing app reviews. We first develop and evaluate several Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) classifiers that automatically detect gender reviews (i.e., reviews that contain discussions about gender). We apply our ML and DL classifiers on a manually constructed dataset of 1,440 app reviews from the Google App Store, composing 620 gender reviews and 820 non-gender reviews. Our best classifier achieves an F1-score of 90.77%. Second, our qualitative analysis of a randomly selected 388 out of 620 gender reviews shows that gender discussions in app reviews revolve around six topics: App Features, Appearance, Content, Company Policy and Censorship, Advertisement, and Community. Finally, we provide some practical implications and recommendations for developing gender-inclusive apps.
Tue 16 MayDisplayed time zone: Hobart change
14:35 - 15:15 | Human AspectsTechnical Papers / Data and Tool Showcase Track at Meeting Room 110 Chair(s): Alexander Serebrenik Eindhoven University of Technology | ||
14:35 12mTalk | A Study of Gender Discussions in Mobile Apps Technical Papers Mojtaba Shahin RMIT University, Australia, Mansooreh Zahedi The Univeristy of Melbourne, Hourieh Khalajzadeh Deakin University, Australia, Ali Rezaei Nasab Shiraz University Pre-print | ||
14:47 12mTalk | Tell Me Who Are You Talking to and I Will Tell You What Issues Need Your Skills Technical Papers Fabio Marcos De Abreu Santos Northern Arizona University, USA, Jacob Penney Northern Arizona University, João Felipe Pimentel Northern Arizona University, Igor Wiese Federal University of Technology, Igor Steinmacher Northern Arizona University, Marco Gerosa Northern Arizona University Pre-print | ||
14:59 6mTalk | She Elicits Requirements and He Tests: Software Engineering Gender Bias in Large Language Models Technical Papers Pre-print Media Attached | ||
15:05 6mTalk | GitHub OSS Governance File Dataset Data and Tool Showcase Track Yibo Yan University of California, Davis, Seth Frey University of California, Davis, Amy Zhang University of Washington, Seattle, Vladimir Filkov University of California at Davis, USA, Likang Yin University of California at Davis Pre-print |