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October 11 - October 14, 2017
The more I started paying attention to how tech products are designed, the more I started noticing how often they’re full of blind spots, biases, and outright ethical blunders—and how often those oversights can exacerbate unfairness and leave vulnerable people out.
It’s not that digitizing the world is inherently bad. But the more technology becomes embedded in all aspects of life, the more it matters whether that technology is biased, alienating, or harmful. The more it matters whether it works for real people facing real-life stress.
despite tech companies talking more and more about diversity, far too much of the industry doesn’t ultimately care that its practices are making smart people feel uncomfortable, embarrassed, unsafe, or excluded.
when everyone’s talking incessantly about engagement, it’s easy to end up wearing blinders, never asking whether that engagement is even a good thing.
When systems don’t allow users to express their identities, companies end up with data that doesn’t reflect the reality of their users.
But that’s the thing about defaults: they’re designed to achieve a desired outcome. Just not yours.
if, for example, Google frequently coded women who worked in technology in 2012 as men, then it could have skewed data about the readership of tech publications to look more male than it actually was. People who run media sites pay close attention to their audience data, and use it to make decisions. If they believed their audiences were more male than they were, they might think, “Well, maybe women do just care less about technology”—an argument they’ve no doubt heard before. That might skew publications’ reporting on the gender gap in tech companies to focus more on the “pipeline,” and less
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Fake suggests that the tech industry instead needs to stop prioritizing programming over every other skill. Rather than relegate people with editorial and ethical judgment to the basement (which is literally where Facebook housed its curators), it needs a “conscious approach,” where ethics, media literacy, and historical context are taken into account.
But the meritocracy myth is particularly pernicious in tech, because it encourages the belief that the industry doesn’t need to listen to outside voices—because the smartest people are always already in the room.
unless tech can showcase all kinds of people thriving in its culture, women and underrepresented groups will continue to major in something else—something they can imagine fitting into.
In a 2009 Gallup poll, researchers found that respondents who said they knew a gay person were 40 percent more likely to think that same-sex relationships should be legal, and 64 percent more likely to think that gay marriage would not change society for the worse, than those who reported not knowing any gay people. The implication is clear: exposure to difference changes perspective, and increases tolerance.1
