  Recently, workforce shortage has become a popular issue in information
technology (IT). One solution to increasing the workforce supply is to increase
the number of female IT professionals. This is because there is gender
imbalance in information technology area. To accomplish this, it is important
to suppress the influence of biases, such as the belief that men are more
suited for careers in science and technology than women, and to increase the
choice of careers available to female professionals. To help suppress the
influence of gender bias, we analyzed the relationship between gender and code
reading speed in the field of software development. Certain source codes
require developers to use substantial memory to properly understand them, such
as those with many variables that frequently change values. Several studies
have indicated that the performance of memory differs in males and females. To
test the veracity of this claim, we analyzed the influence of gender on
code-reading speed through an experiment. Pursuant to this, we prepared four
programs that required varied amounts of memory to properly understand them.
Then, we measured the time required by each of the 17 male and 16 female
subjects (33 subjects in total) to comprehend the different programs. The
results suggest that there is no explicit difference between male and female
subjects in this regard, even in the case of programs that require high memory
capacities for proper understanding.
