"soft;" tactile, artistic, and communicative. Hardware interface findings. Larger displays helped reduce the gender gap in navigating virtual environments. With smaller displays, males' performance was better than females'. With larger displays, females' performance improved and males' performance was not negatively affected. Video games findings. Several findings were reported about girls' interests that relate to video games, with interpretations for the video game software industry. Several researchers explored what girls seek in video games, and implications for video game designers. Among the implications were collaboration vs. competition preferences, and use of non-violent rewards versus death and destruction as rewards. These works argue both sides of the question as to whether or not to design games specifically for girls. Other related findings about gender and computers. In a study of the way people interacted with conversational software agents in relation to the sex of the agent, the female virtual agent received many more violent and sexual overtures than either the male one or the gender-free one (a robot). In the home, where many appliances are programmable to some extent, different categories of appliance were found to be more likely to be programmed by men (e.g. entertainment devices) and by women (e.g. kitchen appliances). There is often one member of a household who assumes responsibility for programming a particular device, with a "domestic economy" accounting for this task. Males and females had different perceptions for whether a web page would be appropriate for his/her home country, and further, females more often than males preferred more information on all web pages viewed during a study. Women who entered mathematics, science, and technology careers had high academic and social self-efficacy. Their self-efficacy was based on vicarious experiences and verbal persuasion of significant people around them. Factors affecting low retention of women in computer science majors in college included women's lower previous experience in computing compared to men, their low self-perceived ability, discouragement by the dominant male peer culture, and lack of encouragement from faculty. See also Feminist HCI Human-computer interaction Self-efficacy Topics in human-computer interaction Usability Usability engineering References Further reading de Ribaupierre, H. La différence entre les genres dans le processus d'adoption d'un logiciel de dessin à partir du modèle de l'acceptabilité des nouvelles technologies (TAM) . Master thesis, (2009). Beckwith, L. Burnett, M., Grigoreanu, V., and Wiedenbeck, S. Gender HCI: What about the software? IEEE Computer, (2006), 97-101. Beckwith, L. Sorte, S., Burnett,