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There is an absolute wealth of connection between more diversity and better products: it’s not that a monoculture can’t make products for everyone, it’s that it

There is an absolute wealth of connection between more diversity and better products: it’s not that a monoculture can’t make products for everyone, it’s that it’s easier for a team that has wider representation to do so: it’s a competitive advantage for them. Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - and had to abandon its first all-woman spacewalk for bad planning in kit availability. Google Photos tagged black people as gorillas. (Regardless of the cause, it shipped). SnapChat shipped a yellowface filter. Google Translate delivers highly gendered results when translating from gendered languages into English. Google Home is 70% more likely to recognise male voices because of training set bias. Women are 49% more likely to be injured in car accidents because the seating position for crash testing is designed for men. And - yes! - Pinterest has struggled to reach men as users apparently because of its SEO strategy. Want more examples? Ask any passing woman what app she uses that clearly didn’t think about women. Diverse teams make better products. The stats are out there. Trying to argue this highly political. We wouldn’t even be able to talk about your point at Basecamp. Does that not worry you? Don’t assume they will always agree with your politics just because they’ve done this.

zimpenfish 5y ago
Another (potentially fatal!) example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.h... > Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
caffeine 5y ago
It's a pretty subtle distinction but I'll try to make it. The examples you give are mostly product examples (i.e. the product lacking features or not correctly addressing its target audience). Therefore I think it would be appropriate to discuss those in the workplace, but NOT as a function of e.g. the gender make-up or racial make-up of the team, but rather as a function of competence in addressing those issues. In particular, imagine a hypothetical scenario where we are building a product, and we receive the feedback that many women find it difficult to use, and we want to fix that by hiring an expert. The goal is to hire someone who understands marketing this type of product to women. Although it's maybe likely the most suitable candidate for this would be a woman, it could also possibly be someone else - and we would be looking for experience/evidence toward competence in that area, regardless of the candidate's gender or other characteristics. To make the conversation apolitical, it would be about specific competencies and lacks of the team or product, NOT about the team itself having "not enough short blue-eyed Turkish women over 50" or some other group. Also, to keep the conversation apolitical, the conversation would not extend to broader social questions outside of the specific product or problem. It would not stray into generalizations about groups. It would not appeal to emotional arguments like "safety."
- bonaldi 5y ago
  None of my examples needed experts to address — just someone of the affected group on the team and (yes) comfortable enough to speak up. Also, even in your hypothetical, there will still be issues that are difficult to raise internally because the entire area is political. And so nobody will, until your company embarrasses itself in very public ways. People bring politics and emotion. If your customers or staff are people, it is more effective to be able to discuss their issues directly without contorting yourself into a "just focus on the work" correctness.
bingbingbong 5y ago
Is the implication here that Apple had no women working on the Health app, Google Photos has no black team members (and if they did, they would have explicitly checked this case?), Snapchat has no asians, etc? Or that some magic ratio would have caught these issues? There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.
- bonaldi 5y ago
  Yes, that is absolutely the implication. These mistakes are so egregious they're almost instantly obvious to people who know to look. For instance, the Health app tracked seemingly everything under the sun, including blood-alcohol levels. The reaction from women when it shipped was instant: where's the period tracker? If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it. But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple-is-very-white-very-male https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...
  - bingbingbong 5y ago
    Apple case is somewhat odd as it's a guilt by omission. I would bet large amounts of money on there being at least woman within the product chain on this (director, PM, TPM, designers). That is, I don't think there's as strong of a correlation between presence of an identity and attention to features/products they would be affected by. For example, I could see a PM reading articles like this [1] and deciding there's too much potential heat on a period app in the default offerings. FWIW I also think this should have been there, and Apple can position themselves nicely w.r.t privacy concerns. Like, at its core, I agree with the statement that having women on the team would not decrease the probability that these sorts of mistakes don't happen. But its positive impact has to be non-deterministic (or else getting into some implications about <identity> as a group which I can't get behind). [1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-tracking-surveillance-glow-clue-apple-health https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-...
  - 5y ago

zimpenfish 5y ago

Another (potentially fatal!) example: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812161318.h... > Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

caffeine 5y ago

It's a pretty subtle distinction but I'll try to make it. The examples you give are mostly product examples (i.e. the product lacking features or not correctly addressing its target audience). Therefore I think it would be appropriate to discuss those in the workplace, but NOT as a function of e.g. the gender make-up or racial make-up of the team, but rather as a function of competence in addressing those issues. In particular, imagine a hypothetical scenario where we are building a product, and we receive the feedback that many women find it difficult to use, and we want to fix that by hiring an expert. The goal is to hire someone who understands marketing this type of product to women. Although it's maybe likely the most suitable candidate for this would be a woman, it could also possibly be someone else - and we would be looking for experience/evidence toward competence in that area, regardless of the candidate's gender or other characteristics. To make the conversation apolitical, it would be about specific competencies and lacks of the team or product, NOT about the team itself having "not enough short blue-eyed Turkish women over 50" or some other group. Also, to keep the conversation apolitical, the conversation would not extend to broader social questions outside of the specific product or problem. It would not stray into generalizations about groups. It would not appeal to emotional arguments like "safety."

bonaldi 5y ago
None of my examples needed experts to address — just someone of the affected group on the team and (yes) comfortable enough to speak up. Also, even in your hypothetical, there will still be issues that are difficult to raise internally because the entire area is political. And so nobody will, until your company embarrasses itself in very public ways. People bring politics and emotion. If your customers or staff are people, it is more effective to be able to discuss their issues directly without contorting yourself into a "just focus on the work" correctness.

bingbingbong 5y ago

Is the implication here that Apple had no women working on the Health app, Google Photos has no black team members (and if they did, they would have explicitly checked this case?), Snapchat has no asians, etc? Or that some magic ratio would have caught these issues? There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.

bonaldi 5y ago
Yes, that is absolutely the implication. These mistakes are so egregious they're almost instantly obvious to people who know to look. For instance, the Health app tracked seemingly everything under the sun, including blood-alcohol levels. The reaction from women when it shipped was instant: where's the period tracker? If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it. But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable. [1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple-is-very-white-very-male https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...
- bingbingbong 5y ago
  Apple case is somewhat odd as it's a guilt by omission. I would bet large amounts of money on there being at least woman within the product chain on this (director, PM, TPM, designers). That is, I don't think there's as strong of a correlation between presence of an identity and attention to features/products they would be affected by. For example, I could see a PM reading articles like this [1] and deciding there's too much potential heat on a period app in the default offerings. FWIW I also think this should have been there, and Apple can position themselves nicely w.r.t privacy concerns. Like, at its core, I agree with the statement that having women on the team would not decrease the probability that these sorts of mistakes don't happen. But its positive impact has to be non-deterministic (or else getting into some implications about <identity> as a group which I can't get behind). [1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-tracking-surveillance-glow-clue-apple-health https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-...
- 5y ago