1000 word blog

Throughout history, it's easy to see that males have had first priority over females. However, times have changed and there is no reason for gender gaps in today's society. When the world only consisted of kingdoms and villages; I can understand why men had "priority" over women because back then the main events happening were battles/wars. Meanwhile, women were in their homes taking care of the family.  So once the battle is over, all the men who survived go back to their villages/kingdoms and receive all the glory. Receiving all the glory and praise will made it seem that specific group of people (or in this case gender) are the dominant alphas.  The women could've gone out and fought which there is nothing wrong with, but then one potentially risks loosing both the mother and father of the family in battle. But that was in the past and time changes things.  I'm saying that because today in society anyone can be anything they want, regardless of skin color or gender. The United States of America is so advanced that there are no norms in the house hold anymore. When using the word "norm" I'm obviously over exaggerating it because there will always be social norms, but in this context I mean that women don't have to be a stay at home mom anymore, women don't have to cook or do the laundry anymore. However, there are many women who still do that which there is nothing wrong with but that could be because they wanted to, met a man with money so she wouldn't need to work, or just growing up with the norm of women having to be the "care taker" of the house. As said before, stay at home mothers are still very much respected through my eyes; I couldn't name a lot of things more important than raising a child and making sure that child has a good home and lifestyle. If it weren't for my mother, who knows where I'd be right now. I'm not just saying that as a joke because she gave birth to me but because she has literally saved my ass more times than I can count. She could've been a lawyer, she got her J.D. but she chose to stay at home and watch over my brother, sister and I because there is nothing wrong with that. It is even easier now than it was back than for a women to compete for a job and that's why the gender gap in the workforce is confusing to me, especially in the tech industry where women were originally the programmers. In the reading "The lack of women in tech is more than a pipeline problem" (S. Mylavarapu), it shows that "Only 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees and 26 percent of computing jobs are held by women" and "just 5 percent of leadership positions in the technology industry are held by women". After reading those statistics I was a little bit more convinced that the work force is biased against women.

Video games have always been looked at as an innocent form of hobby. There are many types of different games a certain console can download but a select pickings of games involving weapons can create a hostile environment at times, especially when more than one gamer is involved. In a reading called "Can a Video Game Company Tame Toxic Behavior?" (B. Maher), I read that the game League of Legends can and has had over 67 million players playing at once. In some of the videos presented I could see when games got over whelming for others which cause a hasty environment. In fact (but in a game/games unknown), games have gotten so out of hand where at one point in the reading (after the video) I saw that in the year 2014; several women gamers were threatened with invasions of privacy, death and rape. In order to try and fix these problems from happening the gaming systems decided to allow gamers to report toxic behavior which can potentially ban that certain toxic gamer. Other things games did to adjust/lighten the mood up was to begin priming, which is the "idea that imagery or other messages presented just before an activity can nudge behaviors in one direction" (B. Maher). Some other things the developers would do is include uplifting/motivating music right before the game starts. Ever since games have been "more modified" to toxic behavior, the numbers of reports went down. Later on, the style of gaming changed with more teamwork involvement games. The only issue with playing as a team is having one player do badly and causing anger through all players including him or herself. That's why whenever I play something I just play NBA because I have my own team of "cpu's" and I always mute the mic of my opponent so I dodge an argument with someone. However, that was a minor issue and for the most part the team games succeeded in lowering online toxic behavior. As researchers continue to work at improving video games we should have nothing to worry about.

"Can a video game company tame toxic behavior?".B. Maher. March 30, 2016.
"Debugging the Gender Gap". G. Reynolds. April 19, 2015. (Movie)