I just read the article "Exposing Hidden Bias at Google" by Farhad Manjoo and I have to say it was incredibly eye-opening. This article was written on September 24th, 2014 which is literally just five days ago. FIVE DAYS AGO. Why are men still discriminating against women? Why aren't all humans totally equal yet? We should not be having these kinds of issues at this day and age. We should not have had these issues to begin with!
Before reading this, I didn't know there was so much bias against women in the tech industry. I just always believed men and women were equal and that the idea that women are second to men was ancient history but that's clearly not the case.
I'm surprised to hear that Google and Apple in particular don't have much female representation.I wouldn't expect Google and Apple, who are basically the faces of technological advancement, to have such a "medieval" mind set.
Although I believe that the bias tech companies had (and still kind of have) against women is unfair, I do understand what they mean when they say that biases are "...pervasive and hidden, a deep-set part of the culture ...". Women have been treated as weak and mindless beings since the beginning of time so I guess that, in a way, it does make sense for men to have this subconscious discriminatory attitude towards females but I don't understand why bigotry ever needed to exist in the first place. Discriminating against a particular race or gender or ANYTHING seems pretty useless and why anyone would put someone else down just because of what they are is beyond me.
I'm glad Google is taking these steps to put an end to a prejudice that should never have come to be but I don't think this subconscious bias will be completely eliminated...not right away anyway. "Everyone is a little bit racist or sexist....people do the worst stuff without meaning to, or even recognizing that they're being influenced by their preferences." and that's the sad truth. There's always going to be people who think their opinions are facts and the only way to change that is to educate them which is going to take an obviously huge amount of time.
"Suddenly you go from being completely oblivious to going, 'Oh my god, it's everywhere," which is mostly how my generation is. We, for the most part, realize the discrimination that exists in the world and are aware of how wrong it is. The first step to solving a problem is realizing there is one which is what Google, and many other organizations are doing, but there are still many steps remaining until we reach a solution and many generations to go to achieve this goal.
