301 Reading 14b DEIB - marsecguy/reading-notes-cyberops GitHub Wiki
1. What occurred during the same time as the beginning of the decline of women in computer science? The rise in popularity of home personal computers, which were marketed to men.
2. Why does it matter that males had been playing on computers growing up? It gave them a knowledge advantage regarding how computers functioned, programing and other aspects.
3. When are diversity efforts most successful? In my opinion, diversity efforts are most successful when they undercut the basic, underlying assumptions and stereotypes that create a lack of understanding and visibility. Instead, too many efforts focus on diversity for its own sake and end up missing the boat. Instead of trying to simply recruit harder in underrepresented communities and lowering the standards for them to get in, we should be looking at the factors for why those groups are not better represented. For an example from my past experience as an over-the-road trucker, there was a lot of talk about how we needed to get more women into truck driving. When I would ask "why?", I would just get dumbfounded looks. The idea that women should make up an equal percentage of the driving force as the general population seemed to them to be a self-evident concept. This led them to doing the same things they did to recruit men, just targeting women. Companies weren't turning away women applicants. With the huge shortage of drivers nationwide, they couldn't afford to. Far fewer women were applying.
What they should have done instead is to take an approach that truly addresses diversity. Instead of assuming that women and men are the same in all ways, they should have been looking at what made more women feel that the trucker life is not for them and addressed those issues. Changing either the systemic issues that concern women about the job or the perceptions about issues that may not even be valid would actually get applicants in the door.
Too often, these issues are addressed with a lowering of standards, which is a self-defeating approach. Standards exist to ensure someone is prepared to do the job. If standards do not meet that objective, they should be discarded. If they actually are indicative of a person's ability to do the job, then lowering or eliminating just sets the persons who are hired under the lowered standards up for failure, which reinforces the erroneous perception that their race/gender or other status is not "suited" for that type of work. Instead, companies should take on the task of working to address the reasons too few are meeting the standards. If too few urban youth are getting into tech, work with inner-city schools to develop tech-centered courses, as an example.
4. Why do diverse companies perform better? Customers are diverse. To provide the best experience for all customers (and, thereby, get more of them to use your product) you must understand them and make certain your product actually meets their needs and desires. To do that well, it is crucial to have input from those customer groups. The cheapest and easiest way to gain that insight is to have members of those communities on the team.
5. Give an example of how a diverse company can serve a diverse user base or vise-versa. A large and growing segment of the tech industry is gaming. It used to be that "heroes" in games were pretty much exclusively white and male. Many game developers have now incorporated systems to allow players to choose things like gender, skin tone, hair styles and other features that better reflect their own identities. This has led to explosive growth among female and minority demographics. More people buying the games means more money for studios to produce more games with greater appeal for the people who want to play them. More profit for the company/more games that people enjoy = win/win.