I heard about an event by girledworld from a former co-worker, who suggested I drop by. The topic was about diversity in the workforce, and one of the speakers was from Google, who spoke about a tool that they have called re:Work, which includes some tools to help address unconscious bias. From their page:
Unconscious biases are the automatic, mental shortcuts used to process information and make decisions quickly. At any given moment individuals are flooded with millions of bits of information, but can only consciously process about 40. Cognitive filters and heuristics allow the mind to unconsciously prioritize, generalize, and dismiss large volumes of input. These shortcuts can be useful when making decisions with limited information, focus, or time, but can sometimes lead individuals astray and have unintended consequences in the workplace.One of the examples given was when video uploading was added to the YouTube app. They found that a heap of videos were being uploaded upside-down, which is a pretty huge bug to break through to production. I'll see if you can work out what kind of unconscious bias led to that bug, and I'll write the answer at the end of this post.
Another one that IP told me about was that for a long time, HealthKit, the in-built iOS app that lets you track things like body measurements, nutrition, workouts, sleep, but for a long time, lacked the ability to track the menstrual cycle - something that you'd expect a large chunk of the userbase would like to do. Apple was criticised for missing something important like that (which they added in iOS 9), with people saying the lack of diversity in the team resulted in them overlooking such an important feature of the tool that claims to let you "see your whole health picture".
The talk then moved on to ways in which people can build a gender diverse workforce. Technology has a particularly bad rap, and one of the things girledworld wants to address is the leaky pipe problem - that the reason why there are so few women in STEM is because at each step along the way (high school, uni, work), women find themselves dropping out for various reasons. Without things like strong role models in the industry, it's easy to fall into the trap of thinking, "Well, women aren't really meant to be doing this anyway, so I should just try something else." If girls are shown at a young age that it's possible for them to work in science, technology, engineering or maths, then they're more likely to follow through with it later in life.
The first step in the journey for a workplace, is to acknowledge where you are. Google released a heap of stats on their workplace diversity. Stats are things you can't argue with. If 5% of your workforce are female, you can't argue that it's balanced. Find the hard numbers. Find out how many women apply for a role compared to how many get interviewed. It's one thing to have a rough idea of how diverse you think your organisation is, and it's another to actually know.
This is another reason why I want to do my Dota experiment. There are so many posts from girl gamers who say they get harassed in games - I finally made one, too (although I wasn't personally harassed for being female in my story). But I've played 3,231 games, and only felt annoyed enough about one of them to post about it. That's not that bad. Not that I'm excusing the behaviour, and saying that it's OK to be a dick in games. But I wonder if every bad experience is so magnified that you forget that you've played thousands of games and been perfectly fine. What if it's just the vocal minority that's ruining it for everyone else? That being said, I'm not sure how many of my games were with friends compared to solo queue.
Back to workplace diversity: the speaker mentioned that changes like this need to come from strong leaders, but there's a misconception about what a leader is. You don't need to be a manager to be a leader. Someone else pointed out that it's possible that a senior leader does want to make a change, but they don't know how. It's not until people start talking about it, and ideas start flowing that people can begin the journey for change. Or they just need to be able to say to other senior managers that there's a critical mass of people who want to change - similar to how we had the gay marriage survey.
It's interesting, I've met the boss of my former co-worker, and he told me how things changed when she was hired. For starters, his formerly all-male team were much more well-behaved when she was around, which meant the meetings were more productive overall. More importantly, she'd often say things that nobody else thought of, and come up with solutions that seemed so simple in hindsight that you wondered why nobody else thought of it. He said hiring her was one of the best things he's ever done. I mentioned this to her after we left, and she was shocked, "Whaaat? He never said anything like that to me." I find it sad that the feedback never made it back to her.
It was a thought-provoking event. I always joke with Special K that we have it so good in the office because we practically have our own cubicles in the toilets, there are so few women around. I do find it a little annoying that people assume that because I'm female, I must have nice handwriting (my handwriting is horrendous). But on the whole, I have to say that for the most part, I often forget about my gender at work. I feel like I'm treated like everyone else (though there's the holding the door thing, and people chastising others for their bad language: "There are ladies present"). I even get roped into the group term "guys".
It's actually more in gaming that I get the "Hey guys.... and Fodder" thing. Which I just want to add: in Italian and French (and possibly other Latin-based languages), when referring to a group of boys, you'd use the plural for boys, i.e. ragazzi. When referring to a group of girls, you use the plural for girls, i.e. ragazze. If you're talking to a mixed group, even if it's 99 girls and one boy, you use ragazzi. By that logic, I'm happy to be included as part of "guys".
Edit: I forgot to answer the question about why the videos were upside-down! It's because they were being uploaded by left-handed people. All the developers and testers who worked on the feature were right-handed, and so it never occurred to them that left-handed people record videos "upside-down".
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