Women Vs Technology

8 surprising examples of non-inclusive design

Hello readers,

Last weekend’s Women’s Day Special piece got quite a bit of attention- check it out because it kinda turned up the heat around here.

I promised that I’d come back with another article on this topic, and everyone (except my wife) knows that I never break promises.

These ideas are very important from a design perspective and have a direct bearing on the work we do at The Minimalist. So much so that even I sent an email on this topic to the entire organization.

So here we are today with a nice and shocking 8-point list of how far our male-default bias goes, and how literally everyone- from toilet designers to piano manufacturers- ignores women’s needs in the design process. Okay not everyone, but you get the point.

Without further ado, let’s dive right into some juicy anecdotes on the yawning gap between women’s needs and what they get:

1. Urinals: Women need more urinals. It’s a fact. The number of men that can relieve themselves per square foot of urinal space is much higher than women. This is due to a bunch of reasons. The dudes can just stand and get the work done but the ladies need a larger space for privacy. On top of that, many women need much more time due to pregnancy, periods, handling elder women, or just UTI, which happens to be more common for them. So dedicating the same amount of space under the garb of equality actually works against them!
   
   

2. Farming tools: Most farming tools get developed for male hands and bodies, despite the fact that more than 45% of people contributing to agriculture are women! The tools are often too big to hold, too heavy to lift, and generally make life easier only for one gender.
   
   

3. Pianos: Just like smartphones, even the humble piano has been designed for men. The distance between keys is too big to be sustainable for women’s hands and even if you love playing the device, it’s not worth a hand fracture. No wonder the piano players list has barely contained any women!
   

   

   Credits: MIT Review

4. Voice assistants: Many voice assistants in vehicles often fail to detect female voices. Why? Because they were never trained on data sets that contained enough female samples. This fact was harder to digest than the two cheese-burst pizzas I had for breakfast. Such data sets reportedly have a 2:1 male-female pronoun ratio, which is equivalent to telling the machine that the world is indeed male-biased. Translation bots aren’t immune either, turning gender-neutral inputs into male outputs.
   
   

5. Tech hiring: This one’s quite subtle and therefore even more intriguing. A tech recruiting company once developed algorithms to make recommendations and help companies identify top tech talent. One of their models developed a clear correlation- those who visited Japanese Manga sites were likely to have solid coding skills and this was great for hiring. But this discriminates against women, who have lesser leisure hours to spend time on these sites and are much less likely to josh around in a forum full of males, where conversations can often start sounding sexist. Moreover, since women in tech are already pretty low due to systemic reasons, such algorithms perpetuate our biases and entrench them even more deeply. That’s compounding but in the negative direction.
   
   

6. Medicines: Enough women aren’t included in drug trials, once again falling into the trap of treating the male body as the average. This is a grave error because women’s bodies are fundamentally different. Hormonal fluctuations, for example, make it much harder to tease out the effects of drugs accurately, so it’s much easier to test them on male bodies instead which might explain why women are left out. Many drugs that don’t end up benefitting males in trials are simply discarded- even when they could have been potentially beneficial for women!
   
   

7. Scheduling algorithms: Just-in-time scheduling may be great for driving efficiency and profitability of gig economy apps but wreaks havoc in the lives of women, especially mothers. These algos fail to consider the care work women have to do after their day is over and assign work even at irregular hours. This gets exceedingly difficult to manage for single moms who have no option but to book childcare services in advance- and more so because these services aren’t even easily available in the evenings. But these considerations are never considered while designing the algorithm. Hmm, one wonders why.
   
   

8. Corporate offices: A lot of the design features of our corporate dungeons are shockingly un-women-centric. Stairs are often made of transparent glass, which means that anyone standing below can see up women’s skirts. Additionally, those steps are often very narrow, barely enough to fit the typical heel size. These are all simple design issues that could be solved if a proper study was done to identify usage patterns. Parking lots rarely have priority parking close to the main entrance for pregnant women. This was a painful realization for Sheryl Sandberg, who barely managed to drag herself to the office while pregnant- and it was when she told the Google founders about her nightmare that they finally initiated this policy. Sadly, such change happens only when women in power speak about them. Imagine the countless issues that must be going unheard. Imagine the number of pregnant women who dealt with the same situation in their pregnancies before Sandberg.

   
   

The examples don’t end. But thankfully, the conversations have been rising and hopefully, designers and policymakers will be more mindful as a larger number of women enter the public sphere and decision-making committees.

It might trigger a positive spiral- one that we must do our best to sustain so that half of humanity doesn’t feel like this world isn’t meant for them.

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