A wolf in a sheep’s clothing

INST 466 Fa 20 Week 7 Research Brief Example Essays

Example 1
                An accurate metaphor to reflect the problem of representation in tech is “a wolf in a sheep’s clothing”. Unlike the pipeline, that focuses on external organizational(sheep’s clothing) measures like outreach, creating pathways, and promoting girls interest in math and science, the wolf metaphor focuses on internal(wolf itself) measures like toxic workplace culture, lack of opportunities for career advancement and perceptions of inadequacy as the main culprit of the decline in women’s interest in tech. Currently, like “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, employers and organizations use these external measures to satisfy agendas like increasing the appeal of diversity, filling a quota, and increasing likeness. While these measures may help in increasing numbers, they are not sustainable because women are put into historically masculinized environments where they are forced to fit into this existing mold, instead of having their needs integrated. To fix the underrepresentation of women in tech, we need to expose the wolf by changing organizational perceptions of inadequacy and provide women with more opportunities for career growth and advancement.

Changing perceptions of inadequacy is a necessary step required to create more welcoming spaces for women in Tech. When pursuing stem fields like engineering in school, “men and women succeeded equally in the classroom” (Sibley, 2016). This highlights the idea that from a theoretical and academic standpoint, there seems to be no hindrance or inadequacy shown by women. Problems arose when women began working with peers and gaining workplace exposure, According to the study “Persistence Is Cultural: Professional Socialization and the Reproduction of Sex Segregation”, “When working with male classmates, women spoke of being assigned to do managerial and secretarial jobs, instead of tasks that give them practical experience (Sibley, 2016)”. In internships and summer jobs “women were also assigned menial tasks like sorting papers, copying writing notes and task coordination (Sibley, 2016)”. These academic and professional experiences highlight how the perception of women being inadequate, leads them to be assigned roles that don’t allow them to develop their skills. Without this development, they are faced with performing unappealing tasks, that steer them further away from stem careers because they receive an unsatisfactory glimpse of what their future work experiences will look like, boring and unfulfilling.

Providing more opportunities for career growth and advancement is another way to attract and retain the representation of women in Tech. In the tech field, there has been a history of restricting the career growth of women by demeaning their contributions and classifying their work as significant. This history can be seen in World War II when women were replaced to take the tech roles of men who were recruited for war. Even though the jobs for women were jobs once done by men, “popular accounts portrayed civilian jobs for women as appropriately feminine, “domestic work” (Light, 1990). This was done to minimize the efforts of women who performed impactful and valuable projects like the ENIAC project which involved women assisting human computers by hand-calculating firing tables for rockets and artillery shells. Instead of publicizing the technical contributions of these women to, the press releases that came out centered the attention on a group of experts who were all male. The lack of “public opportunity to display their technical knowledge, crucial for personal recognition and career advancement” (Light, 1990) curbed women’s enthusiasm for employment at higher levels. With women’s contributions being seen as invisible, it was harder for them to establish credibility in their fields causing women to steer away from tech. The effect of not acknowledging women’s contributions can be seen with the decline of women in CS from 38% in 1984 to 18% in the present day (Sibley, 2016).

To conclude, the problem of underrepresentation in stem fields is a problem that stems from internal practices and toxic structures existing within organizations that want to bring women into the stem field. Therefore, we can’t just be shepherds that view this problem as surface-level and external like sheepskin. It requires a deeper look internally to reveal the wolves(toxic cultures) that create unfit and unwelcoming environments, unsuitable for women to succeed in stem.

Works Cited

Light, J. S. (1990, July). When Computers Were Women? Retrieved October 14, 2020, from http://beforebefore.net/scima200/media/light.pdf

Silbey, S. (2016, August 23). Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field? Retrieved October 15, 2020, from https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engineering-leave-the-field

Example 2

As Melissa Gregg argues in a piece in The Atlantic, the pipeline is a poor, outdated metaphor for describing the route young people take to enter the tech field. A garden is a better metaphor because it captures the complexities in entering and staying in a career, the diversity of roles, and the differences in access to resources among people in the tech field.

First, Gregg notes that a pipeline implies “clear direction from the outset,” while real tech workers face more complexity in entering and staying in the field. A garden captures this. Likening aspiring tech workers to plants, changes in rainfall, soil conditions, or other factors can cause plants not to blossom into the desired outcome, or for this process to be delayed. In tech, as Gregg notes, many tech workers also do not take a straightforward path or drop out of the field. Gregg notes that a pipeline downplays “internal friction” of a workplace. The conditions that plants must brave to survive are analogous to this.

Additionally, a pipeline treats every worker as the same resource. But in a garden, people may plant a variety of plants, creating a diverse overall output. This is more like the real tech field, where everyone is not the same. Rather, programmers, engineers, cybersecurity experts, and others have very different roles and may take very different paths to get to where they are. Planting a tomato may require very different steps than planting lettuce, but a pipeline only devises one path for one resource.

Finally, a garden captures the resource disparities inherent in tech. Gregg notes that women and people of color face barriers to access. There are no barriers to access in a pipeline – everything is the same. But in a garden, some plants, by virtue of their size, where they are planted, or other factors may have an easier time garnering the resources to succeed than others. Using the pipeline metaphor here is especially problematic because it downplays the obstacles marginalized people face and may reduce the amount of efforts put forth by people in the tech field.

Which metaphor people use to describe the tech field may seem insignificant, but it has real consequences for how people view their careers. Using a garden metaphor would send a more realistic message about the field.

Example 3

On the surface, the pipeline metaphor makes sense; more women pushed into STEM education, more women in the engineering workforce. However, this pipeline fails to account for the additional inputs along the way that are necessary for women to thrive in engineering roles, as well as specific fixes to the issues that arise for women in STEM. I propose that an assembly line is a more suitable metaphor for women’s path in engineering, because it emphasizes adding value at each step in the process and adapts to specific issues as they arise to provide a better product.

The assembly line metaphor works well because it emphasizes the adding of value over time. Stations in the assembly line can include STEM education institutions, internship opportunities, and the like, adding value through group projects and practical applications. However, it must be ensured that these group projects and internship opportunities provide worthwhile value to female engineers, disallowing men from relegating them to clerical or managerial roles, as described by Susan S. Silbey in her article Why Do So Many Women Who Study Engineering Leave the Field (Silbey). If no extra value is being provided to these women, the pipeline metaphor takes charge again, assuming that women will just be pushed through into the workforce over time. For an assembly line (and a female engineer’s career) to be successful, it cannot be left alone and isolated once it has begun. Additional value must be added over time, and in the case of women in engineering, through meaningful work experiences. The pipeline fails to account for this key idea, since it assumes women in STEM are sealed off from outside interactions (Gregg). On the other hand, a successful assembly line adds value at each step of the process, and hence is better fitting to a female engineer’s career.

Another benefit of the assembly line metaphor is that it endorses special treatment and unique solutions to issues as they arise, unlike patching a pipe and hoping the problem is fixed. If cars consistently came out of the assembly line missing a tire, the assembly line itself would be changed to fix the issue, and those cars missing tires would receive tires. The same should be true for women in engineering; if women consistently left STEM education lacking self-confidence, as Silbey describes (Sibley), STEM education should be changed to provide women with more confidence, and initiatives should be created to give women more opportunities to lead. This idea is exemplified perfectly by Technica at the University of Maryland, an all-women and nonbinary hackathon. Technica was designed to provide women and nonbinary people with confidence by allowing them to create and lead practical projects (University of Maryland). The issue of self-confidence that women face in the engineering space was targeted and fixed, unlike a blanket fix that would help everyone. The assembly line metaphor is beneficial because it allows issues that women in engineering face to be specifically addressed, not just patched like in the pipeline metaphor.

Where the pipeline metaphor for women in STEM is ill-fitting, the assembly line metaphor fits just right. It accounts for the crucial opportunities that add value to a woman engineer’s career, rather than providing the illusion that outside interaction is unnecessary once she has entered the pipeline. Moreover, it allows for specific problems that women face to be recognized, understood, and addressed, unlike the generalized fixes a pipeline would conduct. Through these core principles, I believe that the assembly line metaphor is more beneficial to the women engineers it attempts to represent.

Example 4

The fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, denoted by the popular acronym STEM, are historically male dominated industries. The pipeline is a popular metaphor describing the path to get a job in STEM fields. Author Melissa Gregg writes that the pipeline metaphor is both an “easy [but] ultimately lacking way to talk about the messy reality… [of] corporate culture in America.” Rather than a leaky pipeline, I believe that flex tape serves as a better metaphor for the problem of gender representation in the tech industry because it shows that industry leaders are more interested in putting on a show and plugging leaks than implementing lasting change.

For the uninitiated, flex tape is a rubberized, waterproof adhesive that gained wide internet popularity due to its advertisements. Flex tape is seen as more of a joke than a real product, which is exactly why it serves as an appropriate metaphor for gender representation in the tech industry. The article states that “employers claim there aren’t enough qualified graduates for jobs” and that despite an increase in women choosing STEM for higher education, there’s a major retention issue (Gregg, 2015). This retention issue is due to what Gregg describes as “an aggressive, long-hours culture of incessant productivity”, and how recruiters only focus on the glittering image of a tech job rather than the reality. Flex tape operates the same way, with an outward image projecting unbelievable effectiveness like sealing a boat together that was sawed in half, while in reality it’s just a form of reinforced duct tape. When asked for a solution, industry leaders offer little more than flex tape spokesperson Phil Swift yelling “that’s a lot of damage!”

In this week’s article titled “Why do so many women who study engineering leave the field”, author Susan S. Sibley addressed the reasons why so many women choose to leave STEM jobs after obtaining them. Sibley’s article introduced the statistic that “nearly 40% of women who earn engineering degrees either quit or never enter the profession”, indicating that the problem originates from before graduates are even supposed to enter the supposed pipeline (Sibley, 2016). Sibley discusses findings of female undergraduates being subject to differential treatment, handed stereotypical roles, and received unsolicited, demeaning comments, leading to changing attitudes and negative outlooks about a future in engineering. The flex tape metaphor represents the layers to the gender representation issue as potential customers quickly become less enthusiastic the more they actually know about the product. A major point Sibley’s article established was that “exposure to the workplace causes concern” and that women were not given equal opportunities to develop their skills (Sibley, 2016). This indicates that a culture shift must be implemented from the top down to address stereotypical and sexist attitudes towards women in STEM fields.

The pipeline metaphor is as Melissa Gregg states, “a way for predominantly male leaders to… avoid talking about… the privileges they themselves have benefited from.” One way to address this issue is for more diverse leadership to develop and implement sweeping change to shift the attitudes the STEM field clings onto about gender roles. And while the flex tape metaphor may be a better representation than the pipeline, next time Phil Swift tries to tape a broken boat back together, throw it out and start building a new boat.

Example 5

This week’s readings showed some of the wrong assumptions made by using the pipeline metaphor to explain the lack of gender diversity in tech. The pipeline metaphor implies that the only influencing factor is what initially goes in through the pipeline. If this were true, then focusing on getting women in STEM fields from the early stages(middle school, high school, and college) should be enough to address the issue of representation in the STEM field. But, as shown in Susan Silbey’s article on why women leave the engineering field, this is not the case at all. Sisley explains that most of the efforts to get women in STEM have been curriculum reforms; trying to show younger women the possibilities in tech, to show them that pursuing a career in tech is a welcome and appealing option for them. Yet as Silbey points out, still only 20% of engineering graduates are women and 40% of these women either leave or don’t even enter the workforce. This shows the problem isn’t only to get women to choose to study a STEM field, but to address the factors both during and after graduation(in the workplace). The main issue with the pipeline metaphor is its lack of follow through and utter dependence on the initial momentum through which the person was put into the pipeline. My metaphor is a rundown, and outdated tunnel system that has exits and entrances like our modern highway road system. If you imagine a ball(representing a person) going through this tunnel system to reach the end(a successful career in tech), you will see that it is not as easy as going downhill in a simple, friction free, pipeline. The obstacles faced in this tunnel system mirror the obstacles that women face in real life that deter them from a career in tech.

Firstly, in this tunnel system, an initial push will not be enough to get to the end. The tunnel system is run down and outdated, if a person were to go through it, they would be met with many obstacles along the way, it shows that it’s not just a smooth ride all the way to the end. These obstacles represent the many factors that go into whether someone can successfully come out the other side(have a career in tech). Some of these factors discussed in the readings include: imposter syndrome, workplace culture, harassment, gendered task allotment, and lack of colleagues sharing social responsibility as a motivator and a value. These are things that deter women from pursuing/continuing a career in tech. Second, this tunnel system has multiple exits, this is a better representation of reality because as said in the reading on deficiencies of the pipeline, it doesn’t assume that the ball(or person) going through will have one job their whole life. They can enter and exit the tunnel as needed. The multiple exits in the tunnel system also represent the people who will be lost along the way due to the multiple obstacles throughout the tunnels.

The pipeline metaphor focuses on maintaining the entrance to the pipeline, but my metaphor makes it so that consistent maintenance is required for getting the tunnels to work. In other words, it is important to get rid of the multiple obstacles throughout the tunnel such as focusing on long term sustained efforts, rather than just focusing on the barriers to entry.