Communication: clarify male domination

[amyjko]

I think the article as a whole was informative, but my one critique was the controversial use of personal bias. The article presents itself as scientific and provides a lot of citing, but this particular passage has too much personal opinion: "Modern work environments are still dominated by men, who speak loudly, out of turn, and disrespectfully. . ."1 The sentence concludes with a citation to sexual harassment which is a work culture problem, agreed, but the beginning of the sentence is subjective, at least the lines about men speaking loudly and out of turn and disrespectfully. What is this measured against? According to whom? In what study? Statistically, you can prove that many work environments are majority men, that can be proven in data, but the rest of the statement that was quoted can't be easily proven and is not proven in this article.  I would prefer to learn without either a conservative or liberal bias attached to my readings.

One thing that could be improved about this chapter is it could address the dominant culture in software development work environments better, and how this culture could be changed to benefit communication. The chapter mentions that the current culture is dominated largely by men with loud voices, and sometimes harassment. How can this norm be changed, and is it enough to simply start hiring more women and minority groups without addressing the underlying structures that have allowed this culture to dominate the industry in the first place?

I think that it would have been better for the chapter to clarify how gender bias exists in sites like stack overflow, and an example of what influence it has which causes women to be less rewarded than men. I am aware of how the environment is dominated by men, but do not know how resource sites also exhibit this bias.

This chapter does a thorough job explaining what communication is and how communication can have positive and negative effects. Communication is described as transmitting information and it is good for developing conceptual integrity where multiple people work on building the same idea while communication can also be bad when expert engineers are constantly disrupted to fix critical problems. In addition, communication was also defined as being about relationships and identity. One critique I have is that gender bias was mentioned briefly, where engineering work environments are male dominated and hostile for women to work in. I would like to know more about how women can be successful in engineering work environments and receive the same amount of respect that men do.