Link to our final project here: Today’s Lecture: Gender Disparity at MIT
Team Members: Kenneth Friedman, Phillip Graham, and Andrew Mikofalvy
After reading through report on The Status of Undergraduate Women at MIT we wanted to share the findings and thereby increase awareness of the problem of gender inequality on campus, and show that the Institute is listening and able to feasibly implement the reports recommendations to help fix these issues.
Our audience for the final project is the MIT community. Presumably most students hadn’t heard of, or at least read through, the report on The Status of Undergraduate Women at MIT which we feel is helpful in understanding the diversity problem on campus and what MIT can do to solve them.
To gauge the reaction of our intended audience, we created a pre- and post-survey that asked for the user to rate on a scale from 1 to 5, from Strongly Disagree to Strongly Agree, the following two statements:
There is a gender inequality problem at MIT.
Assuming there is a diversity problem at MIT, there are many feasible approaches to solving it.
We feel that these two statements best illustrate the goals of our project as we want our audience to be more aware of gender inequality on campus, through the findings of the report, and to be informed of the recommendations the report found for MIT to solve these issues.
From the pre- and post-surveys we found most of our audience went from disagreeing that gender inequality is an issue on campus to strongly agreeing after going through our final project. Our second question, which discussed the feasibility of solutions to these problems showed an even larger increase in agreement as most our pre-survey responses were strongly disagreeing to agreeing.
We also got incredibly helpful feedback on wording and questions to use by our peers/audience and really appreciated the help.