The contribution from Wong in the article “Changing Organizational Culture” that stood out the most to me occurred on the top of the second column on the second page. Wong had previously gone over ways in which organizations approached diversity and inclusion and pointed out the correct and incorrect ways to address these efforts. The quote that most contributes to a bigger argument is “an inclusive organization takes efforts to shift its own practices, policies and structures in ways that affirm, support and embrace such differences to be more equitable”. I really like this quote because Wong demonstrates an example on how to make organizations more inclusive without creating the error of focusing on diversity by including one “token” minority. Wong’s method “places responsibility on the organization” instead of putting the responsibility on the individuals. All too often we see organizations that concentrate on diversity by simply increasing the number of minorities without attempting to actually provide inclusion to these groups.
Wong uses a lot of transition words in her writing as many proficient authors do. To answer this particular discussion question, I wanted to have it relate to the metaphor she gave talking about equality and equity through the use of shoes. This particular section had quite a few transition words, but one that stuck out the most was the last sentence of the first paragraph on the third page, “Whereas equality would give everyone the same shoe, an equity approach would recognize that fairness requires giving everyone shoes that fit their particular needs so that they have an opportunity to thrive and succeed”. This one sentence perfectly tied up the previous metaphor and explained Wong’s reason for providing it. It made me truly understand the scope of equality versus equity which was this paragraph’s purpose. Whereas, however, is not the only transition word used even in this particular paragraph alone. Wong utilizes two other contrasting transition words to fully explain her metaphor which just shows that they are very helpful indeed.
My highlight is that I watched the TV show “The Mare of Easttown” on HBO max with my parents which was a really good murder mystery show. It was especially cool because it takes place and was filmed in my county so I really enjoyed seeing and hearing all the references to places around where I lived and actually seeing Wawa represented in media.
The main search tool that I have used has been the Syracuse University online database because I am not really familiar with any other online trustworthy databases or where to find them. I like the Syracuse one because it is easy to navigate, and the search engine is quite simple in its easiest form. Personally, I have yet to attempt the advanced search features because I accidentally clicked that while conducting research for Unit 1 and was very intimidated. For Unit 2, however, the advanced search tool is something that I want to brave and hopefully master since it will most likely be very useful during the rest of my college career. The Syracuse library will not be available to me forever so if anyone has any other databases that are reliable, I would love to try them out to potentially prepare for the future!
For my Unit 2 project, I am researching biases in the medical field, starting out with talking about the discrimination against the women working in healthcare and then moving onto the biases doctors can have against certain minorities, such as people of color and women. I am planning on finding a few sources on these topics, most likely just scholarly sources, and then moving on towards the primary source towards the end of my project. I know a few people who have had firsthand experiences with doctors not believing their illnesses/pains due to their gender/race, so I think I am going to interview one of these people. If that angle does not pan out, I am going to try and find a true story online of someone’s experience, either through a blog or in a YouTube video. Hopefully a real life example will make the facts and statistics from the research from the scholarly sources more compelling for my argument that there needs to be a change within the healthcare system in reference to unconscious biases and discrimination.
It was so nice to read everyone else’s assignments and see all the different directions we chose to pursue even though we were given the same prompts. I found it really interesting that the majority of us chose very different topics and yet still managed to stay connected under the umbrella of diversity in the workplace. Personally, I chose to narrow down the larger topic of diversity by concentrating on the smaller issue of women working in the police force, so I also really liked how Joanna did the same thing but with a different group of marginalized people: members of the LGBTQ+ community. Joanna utilized many images that really helped drive her points home and I found it very moving when she included the quotes from LGBTQ+ people and their real life work experiences. Another expansion to the canon that comes to mind is Sherri’s. Her decision to include a trailer to an HBO documentary was very enticing and made me much more interested. I also liked the direction she took with the prompt because it expanded on the topic of hiring and the troubles that people with autism tend to experience during that process.
3.The transition that stuck out to me the most occurred between paragraphs twelve and thirteen. The last line of the twelfth paragraph is “”Diversity is just membership,” Isbell said. “Integration is influence, power, and partnership.”” This line leads into the next, “But integration is much harder than diversity”. This particular transition was very compelling for me because I believe it is the one that changed the direction of the entire article. Before paragraph twelve, the article mostly concentrated on representation in computing, but as we can see with this transition, its new focus is now on integration and its importance. Leading up to this transition, Bogost quotes Isbell saying “Are we interested in diversity, or are we interested in integration?”. This makes the reader contemplate everything they had previously heard thus far and prepared them for the change in tone for the rest of the article. After these paragraphs, the article focuses more on bigger companies and how discrimination occurs despite some of their good intentions.
The first rhetorical move that I noticed in Bogost’s article “The Problem with Diversity in Computing” was in the first few paragraphs. It begins with a personal anecdote and the fifth paragraph sums it up nicely when it quotes Webb, the storyteller, stating that “her airport experience can be traced back to the fact that “someone like me wasn’t in the room” when the system was designed, or when it was trained on images of human forms, or when it was tested before rollout”. This experience sets up the focus of the article and leads into the main argument.
Another rhetorical move that I noticed was that Bogost uses the device logos frequently throughout his article, but specifically when he states, “At Google, for example, more that 95 percent of technical workers are white or Asian”. This quote helps solidify the argument that the reader has seen so far.
“It will also give more people of color access to the economic opportunities the tech industry offers. But there’s a risk of tokenization; inviting a black man or a curly haired woman into the room could make a difference in the design of the systems that produced Webb’s experience at airport security”. This quote from the article shows the Bogost started off with a sentence that helps his argument, but in the next sentence we see that he actually contradicts his previous statement.
When Bogost quoted Isbell, he made me rethink the article thus far and contemplate what the argument in now trying to prove. “Diversity is just membership,” Isbell said. “Integration is influence, power, and partnership.”
The final rhetorical move that I noticed was when, in the last paragraph, Bogost goes back to Webb’s anecdote in the beginning stating “For Webb, the underrepresentation of women, black people, and others is a real problem, but it’s not the fundamental one. “We’re all discriminated against by computing.”” Bogost reaches his final argument the computing discriminates against everyone which leads him to wrap it up in the last paragraph.
In many workplaces across the globe, diversity seems to be a problem, evident in the large disproportion of minorities in positions of power or even in minor company roles. Specifically, the police force is an organization that struggles with diversity. These two charts show that, while there has been a slight increase over the decades, much can be done to improve.
Three women Debra Langan and Carrie Sanders (Criminology Professors), and Tricia Agocs (a citizen in police services for 10 years) wanted to delve into the treatment of women in the Canadian police force to bring awareness towards the issues female police officers often face. The police force is already a predominantly male profession, so women are an outsider group within the larger organization. To determine real life examples, Langan et al created a study that featured 16 Caucasian females from across Ontario, Canada. However small the sample size, most of the women reported a poor work environment, in addition to stating that the culture and management is inadequate and in much need of improvement. This is evident in the study conducted where “one in five [officers] … think about leaving their current police force from once a week to several times a week”. Women often push themselves extremely hard, believing that they need to prove themselves more to show that they deserve to be there. Langan et al want the police departments across Canada to address these issues and more as well as expectations for women due to their unfair treatment.
Many of the articles we have previously explored mentioned the various issues regarding diversity in the workplace. The examples these 16 women gave to show how they are treated were very eye opening and it became clear how brave they are for staying, especially since many considered quitting. Langan et al made the internal sexism these policewomen faced very evident in the stories from the article. This study was conducted in Canada about five years ago. It is unfortunate that, despite all this evidence showing the problems and where the department can be improved, nothing significant changed. Problems with diversity within the police force still prevail everywhere. Three years after the study, this particular TEDtalk, linked below, gives additional evidence on how females face discrimination in the police, only this time, it is focused on the United States.
A TEDtalk from a woman that has been a US officer for the past 25 years and has worked her way from officer to chief. She talks about the benefits to having women on the force based off statistics and how females are still being discriminated against.
In this TEDtalk, a policewoman who has been in the force for 25 years reveals that out of all American police officers, only about 13% are women, which has statistically been very steady for around the past two decades. This number is incredibly low especially given the amount of data the TEDtalk gives that shows how valuable they are. She states that “policewomen are less likely to use force or be accused of excessive force; they are less likely to be named in a lawsuit or citizen complaint and the presence of a policewoman reduces the use of force among other officers” while still receiving the same amount of force from criminals that male officers do. Despite all these advantages to women in police departments, they still face all those aforementioned examples of discrimination in the article and TEDtalk.
The reason I chose these pieces of media was to give evidence to our much-researched topic of the lack of diversity in workplaces. It is important to see these real-world examples, how discrimination impacts daily life, and how little has been done to stop it. More awareness is necessary to fix this issue, which is why we need to keep spreading the media being researched in class.
Article:
Debra Langan, Carrie B. Sanders & Tricia Agocs (2017) Canadian Police Mothers and the Boys’ Club: Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Returning to Work, Women & Criminal Justice, 27:4, 235-249, DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2016.1256254
I absolutely love the way that Heffernan approached her TEDtalk. She was able to get her main theme across to the listener, that efficiency is not always the best work aspect, by way of storytelling and setting different scenes. In the beginning of her talk, when she first mentioned the supermarket method to have each worker come to be assigned a task and then return for another when finished, I personally thought it was a very good idea. It was not until she made her point that there are always unpredictable aspects to the day when I realized that she was right. The way Heffernan was able to bring forward her argument in a small easy to understand way and then follow it with much bigger real-world examples was brilliant. She also included some very well-timed anecdotes that became very memorable for the audience members. One in particular was around minute 12:50 when she remarked about when efficiency and productivity are the only things valued. Heffernan then stated, “What gets left out? Anything that can’t be measured—which is just about everything that counts”. This made the viewers, especially me, realize that being efficient is not everything and that there are sometimes much more important things than work.
For question number two, I chose to analyze Renata Salecl’s TEDtalk titled Our Unhealthy Obsession with Choice. It was clever of her to start out with a bunch of quotes about choices and then stating that she was unable to choose the best one. It led into her main idea very well, that humans are very caught up in the need to make the best possible choice and then becoming overridden with anxiety or guilt on whether it was the correct one. She then led into very compelling real-life examples of the anxiety and the fickleness of the human unconscious. The first story she told was perhaps the most memorable to me. When Salecl mentioned her friend at the car dealership who would plant ideas into her customers head and encourage them to make decisions they most likely would not have made on their own. It just goes to show that human choices are impacted by their surroundings and upbringing. She then connects her next two stories by using the idea of anxiety and its connection to predictability, which in turn connects us back to our main idea of choices can be scary but we know we will always be making them. Each of Salecl’s stories blend into each other seamlessly and further proves the point from before while still introducing a similar but new idea. I personally thought it was very well done and created a lot ideas to further ponder.
In the majority of workplaces across the globe, diversity seems to be a problem, evident in the large disproportion of minorities in positions of power or even in minor company roles. Specifically, the police force is an organization that struggles with diversity. These two charts show that, while there has been a slight increase over the decades, much can be done to improve.
These two statistics show how small the percentages of women and other minorities are in local police departments.
Three women Debra Langan (Criminology Professor), Carrie Sanders (Criminology Professor), and Tricia Agocs (a citizen who worked in police services for 10 years) wanted to delve into the treatment of women in the Canadian police force to bring awareness towards the issues female police officers often face, especially during pregnancy. The police force is already a predominantly male profession, so women are, like Kaplan and Donovan stated, an outsider group within the larger organization. To determine real life examples, Langan et al created a study which, while it only featured 16 Caucasian females from across Ontario, Canada, the authors acknowledged this small size throughout the article. However small the sample size, the majority of the women reported a poor work environment, in addition to stating that the culture and management is inadequate and in much need of improvement. This is evident in the study conducted where “one in five [officers] … think about leaving their current police force from once a week to several times a week”. Women often push themselves extremely hard, believing that they need to prove themselves more to show that they deserve to be there. When considering becoming pregnant, one woman stated that it was very important to make sure that you have proved yourself because if you get pregnant too early, then you would be looked down upon by colleagues. It was a fear for many policewomen that, by announcing their pregnancy, it meant judgment from everyone, and when a woman was on maternity leave, their coworkers often had to take over the mother’s work, which further caused poor feelings. When returning to work, the policewoman now needs to reprove herself to try and remove herself from the new demoted position because after time off she might not be an adequate police officer anymore. So instead of just proving herself once, earning her way onto the force, she now must do it again, even though all her coworkers already know what she is capable of. Langan et al want the police departments across Canada to address these issues and expectations for women due to their unfair treatment. There needs to be change and therefore the authors chose to broach this diversity topic.
Many of the articles we have previously explored mentioned the various issues regarding diversity in the workplace. I wanted to expand on the discrimination that we saw females face in the Kaplan and Donovan article when the executive looked down on the other workers, so I chose a specific career that I knew often contained a lot of bigotry. Hearing the examples these 16 women gave to show how they are treated was very eye opening and it became clear how brave they are for staying especially since many considered quitting. This study was conducted in Canada about five years ago. It is unfortunate that, despite all this evidence showing the problems and where the department can be improved, nothing significant changed. Problems with diversity within the police force still prevail everywhere. Three years after the study, this particular TEDtalk, linked below, gives additional evidence on how females face discrimination in the police, only this time, it is focused on the United States.
A TEDtalk from a woman that has been a US officer for the past 25 years and has worked her way from officer to chief. She talks about the benefits to having women on the force based off statistics and how females are still being discriminated against.
In this TEDtalk, a policewoman who has been in the force for 25 years reveals that a very high percentage of women fail out of the academy due to unfair regiment that favor males over females and have very little to do with what officers will face during their actual career. This means that out of all American police officers, only about 13% are women, which has statistically been very steady for around the past two decades. This number is incredibly low especially given the amount of data the TEDtalk gives that shows how valuable they are.
The reason I chose these pieces of media was to give evidence to our much-researched topic of the lack of diversity in workplaces. It is important to see these real world examples, how discrimination impacts daily life, and how little has been done to stop it. More awareness is necessary to fix this issue, which is why we need to keep spreading the media being researched in class.
Article citation:
Debra Langan, Carrie B. Sanders & Tricia Agocs (2017) Canadian Police Mothers and the Boys’ Club: Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Returning to Work, Women & Criminal Justice, 27:4, 235-249, DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2016.1256254
In the article Canadian Police Mothers and the Boys’ Club: Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Returning to Work the authors Debra Langan, Carrie Sanders, and Tricia Agocs use their voices to bring awareness towards the issues women police officers from Canada often have in the workplace during their pregnancy and maternity leave. The police force is already a predominantly male profession, so women are, like Kaplan and Donovan stated, an outsider group within the larger organization. Due to the often time poor work environment, many people stated that the culture and management of the police force is currently inadequate and required so much needed improvement. This is evident in the study conducted where “one in five [officers] … think about leaving their current police force from once a week to several times a week”. This apprehension towards working on the police force could, for some women, be due to the mistreatment when pregnant and requiring maternity leave. Even before addressing the mistreatment of women during pregnancy, the article mentioned how women usually work during their job on the force. They often push themselves extremely hard, believing that they need to prove themselves more to show that they deserve to be there. When considering becoming pregnant, one woman stated that it was very important to make sure that you have proved yourself because if you get pregnant too early, then you would be looked down upon by colleagues. It was a fear for many policewomen that, by announcing their pregnancy, it meant judgment from everyone, and when a woman was on maternity leave, their coworkers often had to take over the mother’s work, which further caused poor feelings. When returning to work, the policewoman now needs to reprove herself to try and remove herself from the new demoted position because after time off she might not be an adequate police officer anymore.
citation:
Debra Langan, Carrie B. Sanders & Tricia Agocs (2017) Canadian Police Mothers and the Boys’ Club: Pregnancy, Maternity Leave, and Returning to Work, Women & Criminal Justice, 27:4, 235-249, DOI: 10.1080/08974454.2016.1256254
In order for me to start expanding the canon on my own, I decided to look more into the themes of the previous works that we as a class were reading. After isolating these themes that I picked out from our blog, I went immediately to the Syracuse library database to enter them into google search. The themes I chose were diversity in the workplace, diversity in organizations, unconscious bias, intent vs impact, etc. These topics were all aspects of the previous articles that I wanted to explore further. The particular article I enjoyed the most so far has been the Kaplan and Donovan excerpt from chapter three of their book The Inclusion Dividend. Therefore, I think that those themes are going to be the ones I explore the most. Personally, I find this aspect of the class a bit difficult because I am not the biggest fan of sifting through various articles trying to find the ones that correspond the best to my argument. I tend more towards picking the first articles I see and forming my argument around those main ideas instead of having my articles back up my thesis.
3. The project that Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan are working towards in chapter three of their book The Inclusion Dividend is to create more aware workplaces, especially in reference to inclusion of all outsider groups. These outsider groups are mentioned within the book as the minority age, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, or on education level, class, or geography. The authors, through their text, are spreading the ways in which executives and other people in the insider groups in workplaces hinder growth from a diversity standpoint. To execute their project, Kaplan and Donovan give examples of how companies can be exclusive through the use of a day-to-day storyline of a supervisor. I enjoyed this set up because it actually showed me the whole picture of how places can inadvertently be exclusive. Throughout the scenario there was not one part of the day when I could easily say that the executive was being intentionally biased; but when I took a step back it became obvious how elitist the department was.
The issues concerning diversity and the lack of inclusion in the workplace have largely gone unnoticed or unaddressed. Mark Kaplan and Mason Donovan bring awareness to this problem in their book The Inclusion Dividend: Why Investing in Diversity & Inclusion Pays Off;Specifically in chapter three they discuss the ways in which executives might unconsciously create biased and unequal workplaces and how companies should recognize these occurrences. Kaplan and Donovan provide examples of these accidental prejudices, such as intent and impact, unconscious bias, insider-outsider dynamics, and levels of systems. These are all things that hinder diversity and inclusion and through recognition of the aforementioned barriers, the workplace can begin to adjust and correct the wrong behavior.
Kaplan and Donovan show these biases in action through an in-depth example of a day in the life of an executive Kim in a company. Throughout the day, Kim countlessly shows that while she might have good intentions, she contributes heavily to creating a workplace in which she does not respect people who differ from her ideas of a hard worker: from evidence, an outgoing assertive male. The sort of behavior that she exhibited was not inclusive and clearly necessary for assistance to create a safe space for all the workers in the company, especially minorities.
