Study Journal 5

11/5/2015

*Granted, equality != quotas. However, big companies such as Google or Microsoft cannot ensure that their hiring process is equal on all fronts; just with the huge mass of people that have to go through, and the amount of people that that have to interview them. Their quotas are a necessary implement when they don’t have the fine control over every situation to ensure “equality.”

*Our discussion makes me think about this point: how do we ensure that everyone has the opportunity and ability to pursue what they want? Opportunity - experience with everything to see what they would like. Ability - lack of pressure to choose something different than what they want. There are so many competing cultural and professional values that press people towards certain directions that it becomes impossible to have unlimited ability, which prematurely shuts down the opportunity.

*I find it interesting how much of a hot-button issue this (women in tech) is. Even though it (women in the workplace) has been in the public forum for decades, it's clearly still an issue, which is why we're still talking about it. I believe that it will continue to remain in the public discourse because it is such a personal issue. The rising generation learns about it from the old, and carries on the banner until the next generation.

11/10/2015
*Even though our conversation surrounds violent video games, I'm intrigued by the number of people commenting who immediately tie it to video games at all. Several people have already stated that they don't like playing video games.

*This issue seems to have become somewhat polarized, which I believe to be a latent reaction to the furor against video games. Enough people enjoy it that, when threatened, start to retaliate back against the anti-video gamers in order to protect what they love. Because of this, the anti- side is always going to be louder, because they have the original passion, where as the other side is just trying to protect a status quo.

*I love that this is still such an issue. Weren't video games first targeted back in the 1990s? You can point to all the 'evidence' in the world, but it's clear no one will listen once they have their mind made up about the morality of the thing. And that's what it comes down to; people have come to moral decisions regarding video games, which infuses the issue into their own perception of right and wrong.

11/12/2015

*How much of the problems we see in gender issues in technology are just because we don’t stop to think? That we don’t stop to question the cultural values we’ve grown up surrounded by?

*The interesting thing about this presentation is that it’s clear that Cydni has experienced a specific culture related to male-female relationships. I’ve never experienced the idea that I shouldn’t go to to lunch with a woman, until just this past summer, and it was such a strange idea to me. On a meta level, Cydni has grown up with these specific biases so strongly that she assumes we have all experienced those same issues.

*We’ve discussed how women’s lives in the tech industry are fundamentally different from men’s lives in the tech industry, because women are still the ones who drive the family (taken from Cydni’s own words). I value the time I get to spend with my family, and so I too dislike early morning or late night meetings.. yet I am not in a position to advocate for that change because I am a man in technology. I recognize that her presentation wasn't about equality in the workplace, but about women in the workplace. It strikes me that as long as there are differences between men and women (which there will be forever) then there can never truly be 'equality' in the way it is currently touted today.