Including diversity in technical fields
During the last couple of weeks, there have been a number of diversity trainings at my work. One of the questions that stood out to me was that in a technical field, does it make sense to talk about diversity? It absolutely does.
Some ways to enforce diversity could be to introduce contributors to our field we can see ourselves in. When I teach about databases and where they come from, I discuss advances from many scientists all over the world. If my students can see a piece of themselves represented, it makes such a difference. I attended a discussion on W.E.B DuBois, a famous Black activist who had many interesting data visualizations during his time. I encourage students to attend such events and to learn more about the history behind our work. One of my favorite books “Hidden Figures” was especially inspiring as a STEM student of color. We can also take certain racist terminologies used in the industry and re-educate ourselves on actively being more appropriate.
When I first started teaching SAS, a statistical tool used for visualizations, database, analysis among many other things, one thing that I noticed was that when we run a piece of code, we click on some kind of Run button called “Submit”. I was horrified to see that the button looks like a Black shadow. I’ve moved on to other technologies and make sure to say the right words/terminologies when discussing such tools.
Many terms in technology use the “Master” “Slave” terminology where one device or process controls other devices/processes. It is best to refrain from using such terminologies and replacing it with terms like “Main” instead.
Other terminologies/observations that I have seen are “Black box testing” and “Blacklisting”. According to Wikipedia, Black box testing is “a method of software testing that examines the functionality of an application without peering into its internal structures”. Again, we can replace this terms such as Inside or Outside. Blacklist is a list of domains that are suspicious.
A few years ago, a Twitter bot called Tay would take a culmination of many common phrases/words said and there was a lot of racist tweets being sent out. It’s a poor reflection of ourselves as a society.
Companies like Twitter and MongoDB are proactively changing in a company level how we are using these terms. According to this website, you can see different terms with their replacements:
https://www.cnet.com/news/twitter-engineers-replace-racially-loaded-tech-terms-like-master-slave/
It’s our responsibility to be inclusive whether it’s for technology or society in general. It can be a simple change such as introducing ourselves with our preferred pronouns. Acknowledging current events and not being afraid to discuss further is very important especially with the recent shootings in Georgia. We are not doing our jobs properly if our fellow brothers and sisters are not feeling safe enough to go outside. My personal and professional aim is to make whoever I work with feel safe as much as possible. If you want to make change, it starts with small steps such as these.
