Week 11 - Sexism bad, Development Good

     In an unexpected turn of events, we were down by 2 members of the group due to unexplained circumstances…

    We were now in a development phase, so ideas did not need to be generated, but instead, hardcore presentation preparation to explain our design model. During the prototyping and testing phases, there were a lot of innovative ideas and things we had to consider or revisit. Based on our feedback from our first presentation we had a list of things we had to account for and come to terms with the limitations of our prototype. One of them is issues after hiring; sexism is a problem in workplaces to a certain degree whether we know it or not. In a survey done by Harvard Business Review (2022), they found that of 7,210 men working in 13 countries most are likely to respond to sexist workplace comments with “benevolent sexism” which is encompassed by attitudes, practices, and actions that seem positive, like aid, flattery, and rewards which undermined their main goal of supporting women at work by overcompensating and providing them with help, protection, compliments, and affection, instead of actual equal treatment. Unfortunately, our scope was limited to the hiring process and as much as we would love to end issues like sexism entirely, we could not. But we did, however, produce a way to eliminate it entirely from the hiring process and we feel that innovative ideas like ours are a step in the right direction. 

Sattari, N., DiMuccio, S., Ohm, J., Romero, J. (2022). Dismantling “Benevolent” Sexism. https://hbr.org/2022/06/dismantling-benevolent-sexism