Sam's Essay

Many aspects of the tech industry do not allow equal access to people from all backgrounds. This is not a unique problem to the tech industry, but it is exacerbated by the amount of power that the tech industry has on society. From the reading “Achieving Meritocracy in the Workplace”, “In research studying workplace inequality and merit-based pay, I have found that such approaches are no protection against demo-graphic bias”. This notion of meritocracy is one of the main contributors to this lack of equal access, as what constitutes “merit” can be a very subjective idea. This is one of the ideas that we focused on when designing our survey.

We wanted to focus on how people perceive minorities within the tech space with our survey. The Harvard Implicit Bias test was the initial inspiration for the survey, but there were certain critiques of the test that we wanted to try and improve upon. One of the main critiques is that the gamification of the Harvard test doesn’t measure the biases that people actually have with their active thoughts, and instead measures impressions that aren’t related to people’s actual biases. We decided to have a more traditional survey in order to avoid this pitfall. We also decided that our questions would be more focused on how people perceive minorities within the tech space. We tried to design our questions to where they aren’t loaded to make people choose what they think is the “right” answer.

Overall, I think that the design of our test was successful in getting good data from the survey participants. We were able to get data that showed us how people from different groups think about minorities within the workplace, and more specifically how they think about Women in tech. The main insight that we were able to draw was that those who are within the “in” group in tech (mainly white men who are in college or college graduates) answer with more “neutral” responses. The neutral responses seem to indicate a lack of care about these issues related to women in the tech workplace. This goes along with the trend of big tech companies not fixing issues related to how minorities are affected by their products, as shown by Google’s treatment of searches for “black women”. This was heavily focused on by the initial chapters of Algorithms of Oppression.

Working in a group and doing code reviews remotely was able to further highlight the issues that we were able to confirm through our test and that were already highlighted by the class readings. Working remotely required much better communication in order to create a successful project. Our team was also a group with a diversity of opinions as we all came from different academic backgrounds. Some of us had a background in computer science, while some of our group members were not quite as familiar with computer science. This was good for being able to better come up with good questions for our survey, and I think this was a big factor in us being able to gather good data.