Cierra's Critical Response Essay

Gender Identity Critical Response Post

The article I choose is, Job Interviews Without Gender, by Katharine Zaleski. Overall this article is about Kathrine Zaleski’s view on making job interviews gender bias. Katharine’s argument is that gender masking is at best a limited means of creating gender equality because it fails to address the broader cultural issues of discrimination against women in workplaces. Zaleski fails to offer a workable solution, leaving us as readers to question how she expects for change to occur in society in which his discrimination against women is so ingrained into society. After examining Zaleski’s argument, I have come to disagree with her because, she dismisses valid positive statistics, she identifies a problem without stating a solution for it and makes an absolute statement without considering positive data.

Zaleski provides us readers with positive statistic from using gender masking during interviews, but still neglects to believe it is a good idea for workplaces. “In 2016, a group of computer scientists compared acceptance rates for code written by women and men on the code repository GitHub. It found that developers accepted nearly 72 percent of code written by women when they did not know their gender. When it was revealed that women had written the code, acceptance rates fell to 62 percent.” The problem with this is Zaleski is quick to dismiss gender-masking as a strategy without accounting for the statistics that prove gender masking is a great idea.

Throughout the article Zaleski identifies problems without providing a solution to back it up. “The biggest problem with gender is that it allows companies to ignore the challenges of making their environments more inclusive.” If this is the case, then Zaleski should have an argument to back up her statement. Companies are not necessary ignoring the issue, they are just taking a small step to change the major problem.

The last thing she does is makes a good statement that could very much back up her argument but doesn’t account for the positive data or counterargue herself. Zaleski says, “Gender-masking tools do nothing to address the culture of a company.” I agree with this statement, they do not completely address the culture issues with women working for companies, but if gender masking is one step closer to changing the issue of women bias that has been going on for centuries, then why not use it.

Overall, Gender bias in the workplace needs to come to an end. Just because someone is a female or a mother doesn’t make them less qualified. Virtual reality of interviews is a great idea to try and prevent some gender bias, it is not going to cure all the issues with gender bias, but it is a start. It cannot prevent it completely, but it is a step in the right direction. Discrimination against women in the workplace needs to be stopped.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/job-interview-without-gender.html