#imm718

Gender Inequality at the workplace is one of the issues that concern me the most, thus 2 years ago, I was involved in a scenario where I was being paid less than my men college, having the same duties and the same experience. When I tried to talk with my boss, he told me the rates were already established and there was nothing he can do, and if I was unsatisfied I was able to quit, and I did.

It is a fact that a lot of companies have been tackled this problem. However, according to the WYCA Metro Vancouver

“Canada is ranked among the top 10 countries in women’s equality in the workplace, women continue to be underrepresented in political and professional leadership positions.”

Thus it is important to learn how to differentiate if our company is practicing gender inequality and how can we work on our bias to become a company more inclusive and fair with all the employees.

According to InHerSight, a platform that measures companies’ behavior, the following examples are different ways to practice gender discrimination in the workplace: hiring, layoffs, job duties, work schedules, payment, promotion or training opportunities.

Companies put a lot of effort into trying to become a diverse and equally company but since they are hiring, they are not aware of what they are doing improperly. In 2016, Harvard Business Review (HBR) wrote an article about Designing a Bias-Free Organization, where it suggests to have structured established interviews where all the candidates have the same questions and in the same order. Also, it is important to look over the ads and make sure the recruitment language used, it is no biased, discouraging any sex.

Furthermore, if we are going to use any A.I tool to hire, do not program it biased in favor of any sex, such as Amazon did last year, and ended up removing it, thus Amazon realizes it is harder to fix it once it is programmed. On the other hand, the Government of Canada has a section called Employment and Social Development Canada were is an article called “How employers can advance equality and diversity” and recommends a platform called “Applied” that is focused on the hiring improvement based on behavioral and data. This platform was launched in 2016 and has been used by organizations, government departments, and over 70,000 candidates, offering them different interviewing techniques and tools that avoid bias and promote inclusion.

Another practice that this article recommends is the promotion of leadership programs where both genders engaged equality. Some organizations such as CIBC worked with MARC (Men Advocating Real Change) and noted a cultural improvement in their work field by allowing them workers dialogue about diversity and inclusion.

InHerSight, also mention 4 more adaptations to implement within the companies to tackle gender discrimination. The first one is to develop an inclusive policy for all your employees and merged it with your companies’ values. The second one is to educate all your employees, helping them to recognized when they or their colleagues are being under gender discrimination and how to report it. Third, address problems, this is the pick of the process because if your employees are reporting gender discrimination, and you as a responsible do not act immediately, they will lose confidence and will stop reporting. Take them seriously. Last not no least, training, if we do not know about the topic, it would be impossible to tackle or recognize it. For this reason, keep your employees trained with talks where they can clarify their doubts and have a better understanding of the topic.

Someone could think that workplace equality is not-to-date issue, it was something existed way in the past, and compare to “Mad men” series society, now in a developed American world women have the same amount of rights as men.

Last year Pantene did an interesting ad that brought discussion about gender inequality at workplace, but looked at the problem from the nowadays angle. The commercial shows scenes where at workplace women and men do the same things, which are given completely different meanings.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOjNcZvwjxI

 The video opens on a man in his office with the word “boss”, followed by a woman in the same setting, only she is “bossy”. A man at a podium is “persuasive”, a woman “pushy”.  A man alone in a dark office is “dedicated”, while a woman is “selfish”. In other words, the commercial shows that identical behaviour often earns men and women different labels in the workplace. The ad ends with the slogan “Don’t let labels hold you back. Be strong and shine”.

 The truth is that we all stereotype certain groups of people.  Stereotypes come from TV, books, personal experience and etc. One of the greatest challenges facing Interactive Media Industry is to resist the cultural, gender, and other stereotypes in everyday work.

 As professionals we should respect the diverse audience, and create quality content that won’t harm anyone no matter of their race, religion, gender and sexual preference.

Moreover, while developing the product we should adapt it to the people with different levels of abilities.

Many of use wouldn’t think twice about that one low step at the entrance of a building. In the same way, web accessibility can be easy to overlook. People with disabilities and their allies had to fight to put the issue of accessibility onto the agenda and into laws. As web professionals, we hear a lot about putting the audience first when designing interactive experiences, and our training now emphasizes our role as user advocates. So if anyone has a responsibility to carry the issue of accessibility into digital media, it’s us right? We need to be the ones asking questions like how are people accessing the web? What kinds of online content is or is not available to certain people and why? What are we doing that creates barriers, and how do we remove them?

Making a Business Case

There are a ton of resources and tools for interactive professionals who want to learn how to make their work more accessible. In a 2010 post, Scott Abel (a.k.a. the Content Wrangler) admits that he has never worked on a project where content accessibility was included in the requirements. He notes that his project teams have tended to defer accessibility considerations until later, when they become more awkward and expensive to implement. His article suggests ways to illustrate the potential legal and financial consequences of shutting particular parts of your audience out of your web content. The Web Accessibility Initiative of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) had a similar idea, offering points to consider when trying to make a business case for why your organization should care about accessibility. They’ve broken their points into categories by type of organization (corporation, government agency, NGO, etc.), making it easier to tailor the case according to the organization’s concerns.

The Internet and Discrimination

Toronto Internet lawyer Gil Zvulony has written a great introductory article about web accessibility (though it appears to have been written in 2005, so it may be out of date). Besides summarizing the W3C guidelines on web accessibility, he also explains how web accessibility relates to Canadian law. While Canadian law doesn’t seem to deal specifically with Internet accessibility (I have searched for more recent laws and found none), Zvulony explains how laws like the Canadian Human Rights Act and the Ontario Human Rights Code have been applied to issues of accessibility. He goes on to look at notable cases where these laws were applied to accessibility issues. One of the key points he makes is that accidentally discriminating against people with disabilities is still discrimination - your intentions are irrelevant according to the Canadian Human Rights Act. It appears that the web has not yet been subject to a human rights challenge in Canada, but times are changing quickly. The United Nations Human Rights Council has already declared Internet access to be a human right. New technologies are allowing people to access the web in new ways, and broadening options for people with many types of disabilities. As the Internet becomes ever more integral to a broad range of services, it seems likely that the courts will eventually have the opportunity to test web accessibility issues against human rights legislation. Organizations may want to think about this now, rather than having to address the problem more expensively later.

Going Forward

As we are at the beginning of our way through Interactive Media program, it’s important to have a plan on where we are heading and start think ahead about employment opportunities. Since most of the industry consists of  small organizations (including many entrepreneurs and freelancers), our employment opportunities are mostly divided between two types: work within organizations and being self-employed (freelancer or business owner).

Being an employee is probably the easiest way (at least at the beginning), because there is a lot of certainty and predictability. Basically you have more hierarchy and less freedom of ideas, but you also have opportunities to build specific skills and learn from others within the larger organization. 

Freelancer is somewhat in the middle. You have your independence but it is hard to plan your life ahead, because you’re never sure where your next meal is coming from.

Being a business owner is the hardest path:  you are responsible for a multiplicity of things (business registration, employees’ payroll, tax deductions, vacations and etc.), but if your business achieves results you feel true satisfaction and you have the potential of strong financial upside (along with significant financial risk!).

Internships are good way to gain valuable experience and get your foot in the door. Whether an internship is paid or unpaid there are many things that need to be considered in order to decide if an internship is worthwhile. The experience you gain can be a key to career success, so it’s very important that you are gaining relevant knowledge and skills, while establishing important connections in the field.

Dress-code plays a big role. The nature of professional dress is somewhat tied to the industry. The way you dress carries certain messages to those who meet you. The interactive industry is different from most businesses, so the way we dress is somewhat different from bank-style power suits. Here are some tips how to dress properly for the industry.

Business casual is the best choose; try to look funky and creative (but not sloppy); avoid very tight or see-through clothes. For example, men could wear dress-up jeans, a long sleeved collared shirt and clean new-style sneakers;  women could wear a casual dress with a blazer. 

Know where you go and daily review your goals in order to stay focus on them.

When I asked Sasha about employment after a post-grad certificate in digital media management, she estimated that about a third of her graduating students found work as employees of a company, a third went on to work as freelancers, and a third started their own businesses. I thought then - and still think - that I would prefer a job. I wonder how successful I would be at either of the other two?

I've thought before that the flexibility of freelance work could be nice - on the one hand, there is the need to be constantly looking for business, and the need to take financial considerations into account, considerations that might be taken care of for you by an employer (income tax withholding, for example). And the question came up in class about how your time is structured in relation to projects: as a freelancer your pay comes out of the budget for a particular project and ties you to it, while an employee might more easily work on different projects within the organization. I hadn’t thought of this. On the other hand, I could decide for myself when I can afford to take breaks between contracts, and probably to a large extent where and how I work. This has always appealed to me (how could it not?

And starting a business? Risky but very creative work. For us, who work in design and strategy, work like creating a business plan and designing service “products" based on clients needs might actually be quite a good fit. Making decisions about who to hire as employees or freelancers - fraught though it may be with potentially difficult conversations - also means you’re in a position to recognize, reward, and learn how best to facilitate good work. The more I think about, the more I can see the appeal of creating startups. What turns me off at this point in my life is the risk. But maybe one day.

Dress

It’s not a big secret that the world is changing drastically. Currently we all live in the world of huge possibilities, in the world with blurred borders between countries, people and cultures, with virtual and augmented reality, with robot systems and neural networks etc. Everybody faces new technologies almost every day. We didn’t notice how so called ‘interactive media’ became an essential part of our usual life. What does that mean?

These changes lead to natural necessity of people to extend a field of their activities, to become more familiar with innovative technologies and tools, to develop own skills. Evidentially, professionals have to consistently boost their knowledge and qualification in accordance with rapidly changing market. What’s important, this process should undergo simultaneously with development of new media, new interactive environments, new digital and web tools.

So here I am: embarking on a new and rather unexpected career path in the interactive industry. This really isn’t where I expected to be. Seven years ago I was starting a Masters degree in ethnomusicology, with the expectation that - at some point in the murky future - I would be looking for academic work. But like many academics before me, I gradually came to the conclusion that it was not what I wanted. The prospect of too many PhDs looking for too few jobs, the prospect of having to live somewhere I’d rather not live (a near certainty based on the experiences of my colleagues), the constrained career path…I was beginning to look enviously at other people’s jobs and think, I could do something other than this…

 As I browsed careers, I came across a discussion of information architecture which intrigued me. Further research opened out on the world of usability and user experience. I began to think about my shape and texture of my digital life with a new curiosity. What had always been background and secondary - not just the what but the how of everyday digital tasks - began to appear more and more in the foreground. I began to watch for the ways apps and websites prompted and cued me, guiding my interaction with them (or not).

 It turns out digital designers and digital strategists are rather like ethnographers in their concern for understanding others. I mean understanding at least two sorts of things about people: 1) people's passions and motivations - what they want and what they like and how they go about pursuing their goals, and 2) the ingrained habits of people's everyday lives - what they do without thinking, what feels natural and normal to them. It’s like that old quote that ethnographers love to apply to their discipline: “making the familiar strange and the strange familiar” (originally a bit of literary criticism by T.S. Eliot apparently, but anthropologists have pretty much claimed it as their own). On the one hand it’s about understanding the world from another person’s point of view, so that their actions and opinions suddenly make perfect sense. On the other, it’s about discovering how the world acts on us to make things feel “normal” and “natural” (and then you find yourself putting quotation marks around everything because you can’t take anything for granted anymore!) In other words, making sense of people who are in some way not like you, while being surprised and confounded by yourself. Understanding this digital space that we seem to be creating all around ourselves, and crafting useful things (“things”!) based on this understanding, strikes me as quite a fascinating and rewarding task. I could do this.

 The Murky Future

I suppose there are at least a couple paths I can see myself taking at this point, and which I believe play to my strengths. Content strategy is a specialization I had no idea existed until quite recently, and now that I know about it it seems like a brilliant idea. Finding out who the user is and what they need, figuring out how to organize information and processes so that they work for the people involved and then finding out whether they do work or not…this all sounds enormously satisfying. Like when I would have an “aha” moment about teaching, and try things a different way, and see the students respond. A sizeable portion of the people employed in the interactive industry work in interactive digital media services, helping companies craft or re-work their online presence. This seems to be where content strategists often find work: with digital agencies or as freelance consultants. I think I would prefer this over working in-house for a larger company, as the idea of working on different kinds of projects appeals to me.