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It's great how you've opened with phoning it in and taking a break from the deep issues, so you can talk about throwaway topics like code switching and stuff the rest of us plebs can engage in thoughtful conversation on.

But to start, just want to point out that we're all doing wonderfully on this breathing marathon so far. Breathing is one of the most important elements of running, and we've all been killing it nonstop lately and that should be a source of pride and strength.

I've been struggling with my term paper since it has something of an identity crisis. It started off as a girls-in-tech paper since we had to prepare to host some middle and high school girls with IGNITE Worldwide (that's "inspiring girls now in technology evolution", we don't come up with the bacronyms). However the research generally agrees that the steps you can take to reframe technology to make it more appealing to girls also works with underrepresented minorities and other groups and I've been grappling with some theories on whether it's a woman thing or a more general minority thing, but the code-switching thing is an interesting clue. One of the theories centered around "state authenticity", which shows that people tend to perform much better when they feel safe to be their true selves, but people also need to change who they are depending on their environment, and if their environment doesn't match their role they get into all sorts of psychological trouble which usually involves them rejecting part of their environment or themselves. Those in the majority of course were in a position to create the environment that matched their personality / cultural backgrounds, so their environments at school, work, the supermarket, etc. tend to match, so they're never really put in a position where they need to deal with conflict and have to do things like code-switching to fit in. So looks like code switching might be an important skill that is brought into a team when it has sufficient diversity that makes a measurable performance impact. The difficulty for my term paper is that it originally started with a much narrower focus and now I have to realign everything and everyone is confused because there are findings that go beyond the research question I originally set out to investigate.

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