3/27 Post

Hello!! Last week we had a great guest speaker come to our class to talk about the women in computing. Her name was Amelia Marsh. I thought her presentation was very interesting teaching the class about how low the percentage is for women working in the computer programming field. There are a couple areas that have a higher percentage, but overall, there needs to be more women working in this area of study. We were asked questions to answer if University of Arizona’s computer programming track does not discriminate towards women wanting to study. I heard my classmates response and I was really astonished at the answers. One women in our class explained that she started with a computer programming major, but changed to ITSA major because the men in her classes did not want to listen to her input since they automatically thought she was wrong since she was a women. The movie I explained in my last post distinctly explained that women and men have the same capacity of learning if they are brought up the same exact way. It really took me by surprise that so many women are intimidated to major in computer programming because of how they are treated in the classes on campus here. Here is a link to basically explain why there are not enough women computer programmers. Another subject we spoke about is the game League of Legends. This game was being researched for having a problem with discouraging new players to play the game.  Older users were using abusive language based on having a bad day. Researchers attempted to fix the problem with pop ups, or nudges, to influence behavior change. This lead to new and older players being more successful in the game. I think it was very interesting how they had to choose specific colors to correlate towards less abusive language being said.

Photo from: http://www.businessinsider.com/more-evidence-of-sexism-on-github-2016-2

3/22 Post

Hello again!! Just got back from my spring break it was very fun and relaxing. Over the break, we had to watch a movie called Code: Debugging The Gender Gap. Honestly, I loved the movie, I think it really spoke out to one of the many gender inequality workforces’ problems we have in this society. The movie started with a percentage about how many women in the future are going to be working as computer programmers and that was only 3% out of the 29% increase. Most computer programmers will be from outside of the US. Would that percentage increase if there would be more girls as programmers since the beginning? In the movie, they showed a perfect example of why there is a need of more women programmers. In the beginning of vehicle air bags being implemented into cars, many women and children were being killed rather than saved when getting into an accident. What was the main cause to this problem? The fact that there were only white men on the team making these airbags. They only thought of their body size, shape, and weight. When the airbags would deploy it would basically only save the men. If there were women on that team, there would have been a lot less deaths because their size, shape, and weight would have been incorporated into the making of the air bags. The need for better representation of both genders is crucial, but also there is a need for diverse ethnicities to be on the team as well. Our future is computer programming and our future will still need both men and women to come up with deciding factors for important problems needed to be resolved. Here's a link for the trailer.

Photo from: http://www.geekwire.com/2015/godaddy-ceo-helps-produce-code-a-documentary-about-the-gender-gap/

3/5 Post

Hello everyone!! Presentations went very well last week. I learned a lot of new information through different social movements. My group presented on Thursday and I think we did pretty well. We had so much information we lost track of time, but I would rather be over time than under time. At the end of our presentation, someone was still a little confused about the overall goal Free the Nipple aspires to do. Basically to put it into a smaller concept, it is for women to feel okay with being topless if wanted to be. It is for women to not feel what their body is not equal to a man’s body on a hot summer’s day walking around. I think the best group of Tuesday’s presentations was Caitlyn Jenner’s transformation starting the movement of people to be open to transgenders. I think they had great explanations and examples of how much social media was involved with her change. Overall, everyone’s websites were very interesting to hear how much social media molded the path of interaction of users to advocate their issue. After all the presentations were presented on Thursday, Prof Daly announced to us that our midterm is this upcoming Tuesday instead of Thursday. I wished we had that extra day to work together in class with questions in the quizzes we were confused about. Anyways, time to study up! Hope everyone has a fun and safe spring break! Here’s a couple tips on how to stay safe during your week off!! Till next time..

Gif from: https://clipartfox.com/categories/view/9244c05c985e14da8f015633374315545789165f/spring-break-graphics-clip-art.html