This article is actually not about gender bias, though it does uses an article about gender bias as an example.
The topic is adversarial collaboration, essentially, the idea is to have people with diverging opinion work together as a way to limit bias and make something better in the end.
Because gender studies are a highly polarizing topic, it is an appropriate example, but I think the same ideas can be applied to topics like programming. For example, by pairing an architecture astronaut with a hacker, one may get something sensible, if both survive the encounter. For me that's what diversity is all about, more than narrow concerns about race, gender, religion and sexuality.
> For example, by pairing an architecture astronaut with a hacker, one may get something sensible, if both survive the encounter.
This sounds a lot like my workplace, where we have a shop foreman and fabrication team who tends to just want to build to print and get it shipped on time and at a profit, an engineering team who tends to hyper-optimize and inspect every parameter of the design, and an administration team that prioritizes process following. Left to their own devices, build would throw together something unreplicable and in desperate need of a redesign, engineering would be perpetually making ever more complicated prototypes and never ship anything, and admin would be holding so many meetings to go over so many forms that there would be no time remaining to make any mistakes (or to make anything at all), but together, it's a pretty successful team.
Sure, we poke fun at each other in the lunchroom, but it's all good-natured. Perhaps that's a better example of adversarial collaboration than a highly-polarizing gender studies paper...
I've found this to be such a powerful thing in the workplace.
I work with some people who I almost always disagree with, almost like magic. But from that disagreement can often come better solutions than either one of us would have been able to come up with on our own.
It obviously doesn't work in every situation, and everyone needs to ultimately be on the "same team" and want a similar overarching goal, and everyone needs to know when it's time to back off and concede a point. But there's just something so powerful about working together to solve problems from completely different viewpoints that prevents anyone from getting too focused on some small part of a problem.
The topic is adversarial collaboration, essentially, the idea is to have people with diverging opinion work together as a way to limit bias and make something better in the end.
Because gender studies are a highly polarizing topic, it is an appropriate example, but I think the same ideas can be applied to topics like programming. For example, by pairing an architecture astronaut with a hacker, one may get something sensible, if both survive the encounter. For me that's what diversity is all about, more than narrow concerns about race, gender, religion and sexuality.