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

by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

It might seem obvious why diverse leadership matters: hiring women and people of color for only junior roles, and never promoting them, doesn’t bode well for their ideas being valued, or their perspectives having equal weight. But you might wonder, why do these companies’ stats always emphasize technical positions (which typically means people with titles like “engineer,” “developer,” or “programmer”), when a whole host of others are involved in creating a new digital product or service? Here’s why: in most tech companies, these roles—much more than designers, copywriters, marketers, and others who work on the creative or “soft skills” end of the spectrum—are seen as the masterminds of new technology. They’re paid the best, recruited the hardest, and often have the most power on teams. While you’re likely to find that staff is a bit more diverse outside of technical roles—and in particular, that women are better represented in communications-related jobs—those roles are historically undervalued (which is a whole other problem in tech culture, but I’ll leave that for another day).

The problem with this kind of proxy, though, is that it relies on assumptions—and those assumptions get embedded more deeply over time. So if your model assumes, from what it has seen and heard in the past, that most people interested in technology are men, it will learn to code users who visit tech websites as more likely to be male. Once that assumption is baked in, it skews the results: the more often women are incorrectly labeled as men, the more it looks like men dominate tech websites—and the more strongly the system starts to correlate tech website usage with men.

But consider the potential ramifications: 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 on structural and cultural problems that keep women out. After all, if women interested in technology don’t exist, how could employers hire them?

“There is no place for ethics in this business sweetheart. We are not a charity,” she recalls the senior manager responding. When she persisted, he covered the microphone on their conference call line, grabbed her hand, and told her to “stop being a whiny little bitch.” 22 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”? PIPELINE TO NOWHERE Of course, the tech industry does have pipeline problems: colleges are graduating relatively few women with computer science degrees, and even fewer black and Hispanic students. For example, the most recent numbers from the National Science Foundation (NSF), from 2014, reported that just 18 percent of computer science bachelor’s degrees went to women.23 What’s interesting about these NSF numbers, though, is that comparing stats over time reveals that women are actually earning fewer degrees in computer science, not more. Originally, programming was often categorized as “women’s work,” lumped in with administrative skills like typing and dictation (in fact, during World War II, the ...

a 2014 report for Scientific American, Columbia professor Katherine W. Phillips examined a broad cross section of research related to diversity and organizational performance. And over and over, she found that the simple act of interacting in a diverse group improves performance, because it “forces group members to prepare better, to anticipate alternative viewpoints and to expect that reaching consensus will take effort.”