2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Debugging is a special form of troubleshooting. Some electronics engineers spend as much as 44% of their time debugging, which has earned the nickname of schedule killer in the semiconductor industry. However, such an important skill is rarely taught in college. To fully capture electrical engineering majors’ debugging skills, our team has developed a series of customized, laboratory-based debug tests to measure a student’s circuit debugging performance.
The first roll-out of these experiments on students revealed a surprising result: female students disproportionally outperformed male students. Among the twenty-nine students who participated in this study in Spring 2024, female students’ success rate in identifying the bug was 100% (3 out of 3), while male students’ success rate was only 23% (6 out of 26). The success rate was calculated over three different debug problems. Students were randomly assigned one of the three problems: (1) opamp malfunctioning, (2) equipment setting, and (3) component specifications. When we limit the comparison to responses to the same question (Q1: opamp malfunctioning), the success rate in bug identification was 100% (3 out of 3) for female students versus 21.7% (5 out of 23) for male students.
In conclusion, are female students better than male students in microelectronics debugging? It may be too early to tell. There may be a few threats, such as limited sample size and potential biases in the student population. However, this early finding in the gender gap, despite its limitations, may have profound implications in engineering education: Are females really better than males in debugging? What may have caused such a discrepancy? Is there something with debugging as a cognitive task that favors a female’s thinking? Most importantly, how can we leverage this early finding to broaden the participation of engineering among female students? This brief will seek to answer these questions.