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September 5 - September 8, 2019
Like in the spring of 2015, when Louise Selby, a pediatrician in Cambridge, England, joined PureGym, a British chain. But every time she tried to swipe her membership card to access the women’s locker room, she was denied: the system simply wouldn’t authorize her. Finally, PureGym got to the bottom of things: the third-party software it used to manage its membership data—software used at all ninety locations across England—was relying on members’ titles to determine which locker room they could access. And the title “Doctor” was coded as male.
We all make mistakes, right? But when we start looking at them together, a clear pattern emerges: an industry that is willing to invest plenty of resources in chasing “delight” and “disruption,” but that hasn’t stopped to think about who’s being served by its products, and who’s being left behind, alienated, or insulted.
Because tech has spent too long making too many people feel like they’re not important enough to design for. But, as we’ll see, there’s nothing wrong with you. There’s something wrong with tech.
Tech is also known for its obsession with youth—an obsession so absurd that I now regularly hear rumors about early-thirties male startup founders getting cosmetic surgery so that investors will think they’re still in their twenties. Within these companies, this obsession often takes the form of group exercise: team runs, pushup contests, yoga retreats.
With these examples in mind, the racism, sexism, and insensitivity of so many tech products suddenly make a lot more sense. This is an industry that can look around at a bunch of young white men who plank together in the mornings and get drunk together in the evenings and think, This is great. This is what a healthy workplace looks like. If tech culture doesn’t notice how its culture excludes others—if it can’t even bother to listen to a woman in a meeting—why would it notice when its products do the same?
She’d also just launched an iPhone app of her own, We Read Too, which helps kids and teens find books featuring people of color.
“If you want to recruit more new grads of color, send technical recruiters to Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Hispanic-Serving Institutes [sic],” she wrote. “Stop blaming us for not doing YOUR job.” 11 The numbers back her up. In a 2014 analysis, USA Today concluded that “top universities turn out black and Hispanic computer science and computer engineering graduates at twice the rate that leading technology companies hire them.”
Most design teams haven’t been trained to think about forms this way, though. Instead, the tech industry has spent precious little time considering how its products make people feel when they ask for information—or whether they should be gathering so much data in the first place.
If you’ve spent any time reading about online harassment, it won’t surprise you to know that many people misused the reporting feature in order to abuse others—flagging, say, hundreds of drag queens, or all the people involved in a Native protest movement, as fake names in a single day. Suddenly, Facebook’s assertion that its real-name policy prevents abuse didn’t feel quite so believable.
Most black families have roots going back more than two centuries in the United States (compared with white Americans, who are much more likely to descend from the great waves of immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries).
But in many organizations, forms are still written off as simple, no big deal. Calm down. Does it really matter that you have to select “other”? In fact, here’s a small selection of comments I received when I wrote about this topic on my blog and, later, on Medium: People get insulted way too easily these days. What planet do you live on? Jesus how imbalanced and twisted your world is. First world problems Is being forced to use a gender you don’t identify with (or a title you find oppressive, or a name that isn’t yours) the end of the world? Probably not. Most things aren’t. But these little
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That’s why we all need to pay a lot closer attention to the minutiae we encounter online—the form fields and menus we tend to gloss over so quickly. Because if we want tech companies to be more accountable, we need to be able to identify and articulate what’s going wrong, and put pressure on them to change (or on government to regulate their actions).
Stories like these are why I laugh whenever someone mentions improving the “pipeline” of diverse students graduating with tech industry-ready skills: Why? So we can get more women and people of color into a field that’s going to chew them up and spit them out, all while telling them to smile more or making their ethnicity the butt of jokes? So we can tell more of them to speak up in meetings—while never acknowledging the fact that speaking up is often what leads them to be seen as “abrasive” or “difficult”?
