In August, The GroundTruth Project and theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media’s team, announced the three winners of their “Women in Tech” fellowship, which is awarded to up-and-coming female journalists interested in reporting on topics related to both gender and technology. As part of the fellowship, the three winners are reporting live from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing event this week.

To open today’s round of interviews on theCUBE, the three fellowship winners, Karis Hustad, reporter at Chicago Inno; Pooja Sivaraman, Women in Tech fellow; and Tori Bedford, associate producer at WGBH, spoke to Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), host of theCUBE, live from the George R. Brown Convention Center in Houston, TX, in a special “Meet the Women in Tech” segment, to get to know the winners and discuss what the three will be reporting on as the focus of their fellowship.

Technical team gender representation should reflect customer base

According to Hustad, many companies in the field have technical teams composed primarily of men, while their customer base reflects a much more equal gender diversity. As part of her fellowship focus, she questions the business decision of these companies to not employ teams that are more representative of the gender makeup of their actual user base.

“Fifty percent of iPhone users are women, however Apple’s technical team is approximately 20 percent women,” said Hustad. “So, the question is, sort of, can you really say that you are innovating for your customer when you don’t have the minds that represent your customer on your technical teams?”

Battling online gender discrimination

In the online world, particularly the worlds of virtual reality, augmented reality and computer gaming, many women choose to hide their actual gender behind an avatar to prevent harassment. In addition, Bedford said female software developers also face this same discrimination, because the online gaming environment has traditionally been seen as male dominated. While this may help the user avoid certain hurdles related to gender, she questioned whether this erasure of actual identity is ethical and may actually wind up contributing to online harassment in the end.

“If you can present as, or perform as, this avatar that doesn’t have those identifications, you could potentially get further,” explained Bedford. “But that introduces a whole bunch of ethical issues where there’s this erasure of identity, there’s this erasure of culture, there’s this gender blindness and race blindness.”

Additionally, the Gamergate movement in 2014 shed a lot of light on the fact that female gamers and game coders were being heavily harassed online through social media. Sivaraman questioned whether or not the game makers themselves are contributing, possibly unintentionally, to the online discrimination of women gamers.

“I think the Gamergate movement shows that there is this definite miscommunication between the people who are creating the games and the people that are using them,” said Sivaraman. “When you look at mainstream games, they’re very sexist, they’re very misogynistic, and they don’t seem to be made for a female audience.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE andtheCUBE’s coverage of the Anita Borg Institute’s Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing.

Photo by SiliconANGLE