|
When my career first began, I was on a team of five women Database
Administrators (DBAs). Within 9 months, one of the five who was hired at
the same time as I was left the industry. She was young, single, had a degree
in Computer Science (CS) with a focus on database technology, and had no
children. I had difficulty understanding how I, a divorced mother of three, with
a young baby and no CS degree, would make it if she couldn’t.
Over the next 6 years, I was too busy with my own career and raising children
to notice that I’d gone from an all-female DBA team to the lone woman on
the team. As my career continued to advance, my traditional idea that women
were Database Administrators and men were in networking and server
administration changed to a point where the cultural norm that men were
in IT and women were a rarity in the industry became the reality around me.
It wasn’t until an unsettling situation experienced by a peer forced me to
examine what the real culprit was, and I discovered most policies around
discrimination and harassment were rarely capable of deterring from gender
bias impacting diversity. I felt the need to speak out, but it was clear that I
needed to begin research to understand it all. Bias is a complex biological
mechanism that developed historically as part of heuristics and is built out
of experiences and cultural upbringing. Historically, heuristic traits are built
to protect us from consuming plants that look similar to those we already
know are poisonous or avoid similar environment situations that previously
put us in danger. We learn by experience and example, but to do so, a human
will simplify and categorize their surroundings to ease the demand for deep
investigation of safety concerns. To give you a less dangerous example of how
heuristics works, if I were to give you a lime, you expect to be handed a small,
round, green citrus. If instead you were offered a red, fingerling lime, a bananashaped
minority of the lime family originally from Australia, a percentage of
people will have great difficulty accepting the fact that it’s a lime. It doesn’t fit
within their expectation of a what a lime looks like. This protective process
that bias sources from has a significant purpose though, as it is used to identify
environmental dangers, such as poisonous foods and physical threats, will also
arise in this benign situation, resulting in a percentage of individuals rejecting
the lime that doesn’t meet their expected criteria. We are all subject to
heuristics, both men and women, although some personality types are more
dependent upon their heuristic tendencies. They don’t like to be outside their
comfort zone, breaking with tradition or open to change. |
