Designing for and with gender in emerging technologies

Presented at this year’s Interaction 20 — IxDA’s international interaction design conference – this commentary explores how designers can consider gender more wholly when developing new products and services.

Gender in today’s society

Few of us today are unfamiliar with the commonly accepted gender binary that exists in our society. This binary reflects societal expectations of masculinity and femininity, and it has come to permeate all aspects of our shared lives. There are however, an increasing number of people who are finding space outside this gender binary. In 2020, gender expression is proliferating. People are beginning to question the inherent gender norms in everything we create and consume and individuals are requiring much greater scope when it comes to their own personal gender expression. Unfortunately, this movement away from gender norms has been met with some opposition and we’ve seen certain parties working to retain a gender binary, hence limiting the freedom of gender non-conforming people.

The gender paradox

With this in mind, it is interesting to take a look at who or what else is perpetuating the gender binary. In recent years an increasing number of organisations have been working towards gender equality and a binary gender balance. Fjord is one such organisation. Just last year our design and innovation studio achieved the commendable milestone of 50:50 gender balance across our global design team. This is an important achievement, but does this mean that our own organisation — and many others like it — are perpetuating the gender binary?

This is a new type of gender paradox. On one hand there is the proliferation of gender expression in all its wonderful forms and on the other hand there are the equally gallant efforts being made to ensure gender balance in workplaces and organisations. Certainly, both are very worthwhile endeavours but it could be debated that the objectives of these efforts are somewhat in conflict.

Gender in our work

As technology has become more and more ingrained into our everyday lives, society has started to reassess human-machine interactions with much greater scrutiny. Major voices are calling out the issues surrounding algorithmic decision making, and in response to this negative attention teach players such as Accenture have been making efforts to better understand algorithmic processes and their consequences. AI algorithms are trained to make decisions based on historic data, so if this historic data contains latent bias those decisions may reflect that bias in their predictions. This has been a topic of focus at the Dock — Accenture’s global innovation centre in Dublin — where we have developed an Algorithmic Fairness Tool to help build a better understanding of where and how sensitive variables — such as gender — can impact these kinds of decision making systems.

Future of Conversation is another Dock project that has seen issues of gender coming to the surface in recent research. This project has been exploring the paradigms around machine-human conversations and has shown that anthropomorphism is playing a major role in the area of conversational design. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human-like characteristics and behaviour to non-human objects, and one of the characteristics most often attributed to in conversational agents has of course been gender.

Gender as a design trend

Gender has emerged as an important issue in Fjord Trends over the last two years in response to an increasing demand for technologists and designers to incorporate gender in the products, experiences and services more sensibly.

A 2019 Trend called “The Inclusivity Paradox” detailed how people now expect organizations to see and engage with them as individuals. But there is a risk that by trying to be more inclusive, organizations inadvertently exclude others.

As an evolution to last year, a 2020 trend just published before Christmas, has been dubbed “Liquid People”, and discusses how organizations must support individual customers’ and employees’ increasingly changeable desires and their pursuit of greater meaning in their lives.

Albeit on a wider scale, these trends share our sentiment. It’s a similar discussion on the trade-off between enabling individuality while catering for the masses. The gender paradox is at the heart of these design trends.

Emerging markets and solutions

As we find new ways to interact with emerging technology, gender is becoming more and more encoded into our digital experiences. As a result of our research in this area, a couple of recent works came to our attention. They exemplify the thoughtful treatment of gender issues in the development of new products and services. These new technologies sit at the intersection of design, technology and gender and exemplify a growing awareness of the issues around what we call the gender paradox:

· Textio Hire is an online tool that uses data science to reveal latent gender bias in written job postings and it also suggests alternatives so that employers can recruit from the widest possible pool of qualified candidates.

· I’d blush if I could, a UNESCO publication from 2019 shares strategies to close gender divides in digital skills through education, drawing attention to the harmful gender biases entrenched by widely known digital assistants.

· Q is the world’s first genderless voice assistant created in collaboration of Copenhagen Pride, Virtue, Equal AI, Koalition Interactive & thirtysoundsgood. At the core, Q is similar to other well-known virtual assistants like Siri or Alexa, but without a designated gender. It’s been created as a step towards removing gender identities and fostering more inclusivity within voice technology.

· F’xa is a feminist chatbot designed to teach its users about AI bias and point them towards actions that can help reduce it. It has been created by a team from the Feminist Internet by people of many different races, genders, gender identities and ways of thinking.

Close to home, two second level students recently won Ireland’s biggest youth science award with a ground-breaking study on gender bias in young schoolchildren, developing their own educational toolkit to counter gender stereotyping in primary schools.

All of these examples are indicative of the industry’s demand for gender sensitivity and they also show that gender is a concern of the next generation of young researchers and consumers.

What have we learnt?

The learnings here are twofold.

In order to address the inherent challenges and paradoxes of designing for gender we must firstly acknowledge the complexity, vastness and fluidity of the gender landscape. Then secondly we must accept and act on the urgent need for all of us working on the design of new products and services to consider gender at all stages of the design process.

Many thanks to our fellow team members at Fjord and The Dock for sharing their knowledge and experience around this topic, and for valuable feedback on this article.

Dan Eames is a Visual Designer with Fjord at The Dock, Accenture’s global centre for Innovation. He uses visual language to help unravel complex ideas, information and systems.

Frauke Hein is a Data Designer also with Fjord at The Dock. Her work combines analytics insights with design practices to build digital experiences.