In a world primarily built and designed for men, unconscious design bias means gender often fails to be taken into account. And it’s women who pay—from losing our jobs to losing our lives. The most alarming thing? Design bias is only the most obvious part of a much deeper inequality
Seat belts, artificial heart transplants, voice-command systems in cars, even iPhones. What do these items all have in common? Gendered design bias.
Supposedly designed for the ‘average person’, these products in reality cater to the ‘average male’. People tend to design for needs and wants they can personally relate to, so if the majority of tech companies are led by men, with a primarily male workforce, they will be more likely to fail to understand the needs and problems women face—and their products will reflect that.
Globally, the percentage of women employed at major tech companies, on average, is less than half their total employees. Women made up 33 percent of tech giant Apple’s workforce in 2018—a growth of just 3 percent since 2014. Google's employees were 31.6 percent female in 2019, while others are as low as 19 percent.
A multitude of companies have come under fire for designs that fail to consider the needs of women. Apple has been in hot water multiple times recently. In late 2019, their new Apple Card was placed under investigation to determine whether its algorithm was discriminating against women by giving them a credit score up to 10 times lower than their male counterparts.
And despite the fact that women buy more iPhones than men, many women have called out Apple for designing a phone that is too large for the average woman to use with one hand.
“I’m not saying Apple is being evil and deliberately setting out to design phones that injure women by being too big for the average female hand,” said author of Invisible Women, Caroline Criado-Perez, to The Independent at the time. “They are just part of an industry—and a world—that consistently fails to remember that women are 50 percent of the population.”
A Vicious Cycle
Why aren’t there more women in tech firms to contribute to these designs and identify how the products fail women? The answer, ironically, is partly down to design bias. Verlebie Chan, the co-founder of women’s tech community Connected Women Hong Kong and software development engineer for Microsoft, says that Amazon, for example, has been found to use a biased AI system. “Amazon uses an AI system for recruitment purposes, where they score the candidates and scan through their entire CV to recommend certain candidates,” she says. “But we found that there was actually a bias within the algorithm that downgraded women’s CVs based on having the word ‘women’ within the document, like ‘Women’s Tennis Club’.”
“It’s not purposely designed that way, it’s the fact that we’re not aware of the bias. The algorithm is trained by historical data, so if previously successful candidates have all come from ‘Men’s Clubs’, or from certain industries and backgrounds, then that is the data that will train the algorithm,” Chan says. “It’s a vicious cycle, because if we continue to be the minority it will be reflected in the data again and will continue training the AI that way.”
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Bad Design Leads To More Women Dying
The inability to take sex into account isn’t just about the size of your phone—it can result in sickness or even death.
Seat belts were designed for the average male physique, as was the driver's seat of a car—a design flaw that has led to higher risk of death or serious injury for women, whose physiques are different on average, and tend to sit further forward. Even today, 62 percent of women in their third-trimester of pregnancy don’t fit into the standard seatbelt design. The only artificial heart on the market in the US fits 80 percent of men, but only 20 percent of women. And the list goes on.
“People within the tech field are quite aware of the bias, but people who aren’t in the industry aren’t as aware,” says Chan. “I think people are learning more and more about it, but I still don’t think it’s enough.”
Jill Tang, the co-founder of Ladies Who Tech, an organisation focused on closing the gender gap in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), agrees that society needs to be more clued in when it comes to unconscious bias. “If people continue to be unaware of the gender imbalance we face, then we’re going to have to continue living in this world of gender inequality.”
From a purely business perspective, alienating your company from 50 percent of the global population is far too big of an economic loss to ignore, Tang says. “If you continue to see men and women in traditional working roles then you are not optimising the contribution from women where they are able to contribute more to the GDP,” says Tang. “At a corporate level, when there are higher levels of gender diversity there are also higher levels of innovation, and that really helps to bring in more profit.”
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