Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

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’ll only be successful in ridding tech of its excesses and oversights if we first embrace a new way of seeing the digital tools we rely on—not as a wonder, or even as a villain, but rather as a series of choices that designers and technologists have made. Many of them seem small: what a button says, where a data set comes from. But each of those choices reinforces beliefs about the world, and the people in it.

It’s up to us to demand that those choices be made differently—not because we want to see technology fail, but rather because we want it to succeed, on terms that work for all of us. After all, most of us don’t hate tech. We love it. It’s time we demand that it love us back.