Feminine expertise in architecting teams

A well-known adage says "diversity brings innovation". Diversity can be in culture, in thinking, in discipline, in gender, and in many more aspects. The result is the same: the chances for creating innovation in a given context increase when diversity is involved. To some extents we believe that the principle holds as well for gender diversity in ICT-related businesses. We have been investing for decades in achieving gender balance in fields related to ICT and Computer Science. We complain that too few women choose a technology-related career. But is it really true that gender diversity contributes to innovation, or more in general, brings concrete, technical advantages to the ICT outcomes? In this work we start addressing this important and strangely enough mostly unexplored problem. We carried out an interview survey in the Netherlands in four major ICT companies: Capgemini, Cisco, IBM and Oracle. We involved software architects and team leaders. An important concrete result is that we identified 7 feminine expertise flavors, out of which many are about skills required to successfully deal with the human aspects of the software industry.