What Really Keeps Women Out Of Tech By Eileen Pollack Summary

On 10 October 2015, Eileen Pollack published an article in the online New York Times titled “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech”. This article points out that there is a serious gender and diversity problem among the computer science and engineering professions. Pollack uses the studies and experiments that Dr. Sapna Cheryan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, has done to argue her points. Along with Dr. Cheryan’s experiments and conclusions, Pollack drew some of her own conclusions about being a woman in a male-dominated field and how it affected her mindset. Pollack’s article is overall effective because her main goal was to bring about awareness to the issue of computer science and engineering professions being male-dominated

Pollack had earned a bachelor of science in physics in the 1970s, but left the field because she felt that she did not belong. She deploys the use of pathos in that she describes in detail her experiences of being mocked and teased in the workplace purely based on the fact that she was a woman. She relies on the audience’s ability to sympathize with her to make her point. Pollack’s story resonates with the audience because it shows she had to stop doing what she loved because she was constantly made fun of for not fitting in because of her gender. As the audience reads about her experiences, they begin to understand that women being discriminated against in certain fields is no longer just a myth or a hypothetical situation, but it is reality. By using her own personal experiences, she helps the audience feel as if they have a personal connection with her, so they are more likely to take her seriously and listen to the

We can recognize her purpose by simply skimming the article and noticing that that is her main focus from the start with the quote, “technology companies know they have a gender and diversity problem in their work force.” The underlying purpose for Pollack’s article was to persuade women to branch out and try taking a computer science class to attempt to expand their horizons and maybe open up some women’s eyes. We know this because of her quote in the last paragraph stating “we need women and minorities to enjoy an ambient sense of belonging in those professions if the future they create is going to be one in which all of us feel at home.” She supports her statements by using the experiments and findings of Dr. Cheryan and her researchers. She also uses an approach that ties in her own experiences to her findings, which gives her a sense of credibility in the readers’