Inclusion, Diversity

Hat tip to Geek Feminism for the links:

1. Ellen Pao Speaks: ‘I Am Now Moving On’ Ellen Pao writes about the bad in Diversity & Inclusion today, including:
1. issues with legal assumptions about discrimination, that do not reflect today's implicit biases
2. the financial costs of being a plaintiff, and the severe inequality of resources for a case like hers
3. Quote: "I have a request for all companies: Please don’t try to silence employees who raise discrimination and harassment concerns. Instead allow balanced and complete perspectives to come out publicly so we can all learn and improve."
2. Insurance and Feelings a Slack employee writes about a company that is successfully including everybody.
1. "even in the rough bits, I still feel like I’m ok to be myself. I still feel like I’m part of the team. I still don’t feel like I’m different. I still feel like I belong."
2. "One [catchphrase]though, is pretty demonstrative of what I think makes Slack feel good to me: “We’re all in this together.”"

Incentivizing Understanding of Customer Needs

One of the issues with diversity & inclusion discussions, is that it can often create cognitive dissonance.

One example of cognitive dissonance played out during the 1990's, at a time when I had taken to reading Parade magazine from the Sunday paper. The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman. Marilyn Vos Savant posts the published material here: Game Show Problem .

To me, the thousands of letters Ms. Vos Savant received are an early prelude to the Internet dog-piling culture we see today. Some of the letters seem as if they could have come straight from Derailing for Dummies.

In Long Fuse, Big Bang, Haseltine discussed a behavioral conditioning box:

Resources about NASA culture

This is taking me longer than I wanted.  I have said that NASA's civil servant culture (from the Contractor position) has looked like one of the best places for women to work. That's actually one of the reasons I want to work there. So I'm going to start out with some general comments about organization culture from my management coursework, and then provide links to some of the literature and stories that already exist and/or are coming soon.

The culture of any organization is influenced by the structure, the corporate / institutional culture, the work-group culture, the geographically local surrounding culture, and customer and supplier culture.  All of these, together, create subtle differences in individual experience. Houston is different from Huntsville, Boeing is different from Lockheed Martin.

There is a precedence for former engineers who have become writers, speakers, including Homer Hickam himself. I am considering that path, as I've seen openings and opportunities to write... but I am not ready to give up on my technical career yet.

For today, I'm going to point to existing resources:

Language Learning

I've always been fascinated by languages.

I can remember thinking about the Biblical Tower of Babel, and wondering what the first language was. So over the years, when I came across a newspaper article about linguistics, languages, or the human brain, I've usually read them.

The space station program became international very soon after it was begun, as the European Space Agency  and the Japanese were invited to participate with their own modules. So, for me, studying languages became closely tied to my fascination with spaceflight and my awareness of globalization.

The Base library proved an excellent resource for that fascination, as I could check out books attempting to teach myself a dozen different languages at once. Of course I bit off more than I could chew, I would have done better to focus on one at a time. The one I went farthest in, was reading and writing Finnish, as I found a good resource. But I've forgotten most of it since then.

When I finally had the opportunity to learn a language (Spanish) in school, I took it. One Valentine's Day, the teacher handed us a worksheet and asked us to match the translation of "I love you" to the appropriate language.

While my language reading hadn't taught me the language, per se, I had a pretty good feel for "this looks like the Chinese symbols," and "this looks like German", so that I had the most accurate answers.

Why does all of this matter?

Language is another key component to culture, that American culture likes to... overlook? ignore? criticize? A Host of Tongues describes how people in the United States inherited the British tendency to just speak louder when confronted with someone who doesn't speak English. It's a fascinating book, if you're interested in the history of languages and attitudes toward language in this country.

I knew from an early age that I did not want to be one of those "ugly Americans" who travel overseas and then wonder why the locals don't speak English.

I know from Found in Translation: How Language Shapes Our Lives and Transforms the World and my own experiences, that because my primary responsibility is to the technical design, I will most likely need a professional translator for business. As much as I enjoy language learning, what I have had time to learn has tended to be needs-focused.

There are several apps that break vocabulary down, and travelers phrasebooks. Any one can learn a few phrases, if not well before the trip, then at least on the airplane. If you only have time for 20 words or phrases, learn:

Beginning a survey on religions

I'm going to start a series next week, taking one world religion at a time and attempting a 50,000-foot view of origin, founder (if any), holy book(s), and major holy days or celebrations. It seems to me that this is a significant part of culture that many people overlook.

I grew up in a religious family, where our faith was a big part of our lives, and not just on Sunday morning. I have known many people in the United States for whom that is also true. A few years back, I found an article one Facebook discussing why several Muslim students chose to attend the University of Notre Dame, a major Catholic campus.  Among the reasons was that a religious campus understood religious observations that can include clothing and dietary restrictions.