Interview - Growth, Education, Women in the Workplace

By Yiler Huang

In this semester, we have three major topics: genetics, gender, and the worth of a person. In an attempt to know more about people's thoughts and opinions about gender and how the value of a person is determined, we designed an interview with two workers from a graphics design company called Gear 8. Most questions we designed include elements about the relationship between gender and a person's life in different stages of their life. We had two interviewees in total, both of them were women designers who work in Gear 8. We divided their lives to 5 stages, before middle school, middle school and high school, university, job searching phase, and job phase.

There are a few interesting findings I discovered in the result of the interview. The first being that surprisingly, the two interviewees both said they played with game consoles and computers at their young age. This was a surprising fact to me because from my personal experience, not many female peers I knew before middle school played video games. This is unexpected to me because if video games were so popular among females back then, I would expect there would be more females playing video games nowadays because video games have gain more popularity in the modern days. However, this could also be resulted by our limited sample size. Another surprising thing was one of the interviewees said she fought with her brother, and would beaten by her father. Even though I could imagine siblings fighting, it is surprising to me that parents back then were so physical to their daughters. The last thing I found unexpected was how different the interviewees' working environment is from the tradition. From the description given by the interviewees, it seems like the common problems such as job distribution, women's break after having a kid etc. don't really happen in this company.

After the interview, I have some opinions on the topic of gender quality in society. If we were to compare society from when the interviewees were young to society nowadays, I would say that gender equality improved in the working field but stayed the same or gotten worse in how people treat children. I think this way because it seems like the environment girls and boys were exposed to were much more similar when the interviewees were young. I believe kids in the modern days have more choices to choose what they want instead of choosing what they are given, so kids might have more chance to get access to things they actually want. I believe this proved that the society is improving in allowing everyone to choose what they want based on their gender and preference. On the other hand, we can see the improvement of gender equality in workplaces, and I think this is also nice. I believe that the interviewees' company seems like a good example of a company with good gender equality. The interviewees described that the boss of the company would discuss with the employees about the difficulties they are having, such as pregnancy or taking care or children, and come up with a solution to help with the employee. In my opinion, we should not focus too much on changing the policies in companies to improve the gender equality, we should instead focus more on the needs of each individual and help them with the difficulties they are having like what Gear 8 is doing.

In conclusion, we obtained many interesting and useful information in this interview. We have learned about how children were treated in the past, how society put expectations on teenagers, and the current situation of gender equality in the modern society. We have also learned surprising things such as the similarity between the media girls and boys consume back then, how girls were treated by their parents when they were young, and how companies in the modern age have changed to improve gender equality. Overall, we have learned many useful things about society in the past compared to the modern day, and a general overview of female in work places. I believe that Gear 8 is an exemplar of gender equality in workplaces, and other companies should follow what Gear 8 is doing to improve the general workin experience of workers from both genders.