Building better products for *everyone*

Hint: it’s all about the team

I am a fan of Neil DeGrasse Tyson. I might not have seen all of his TV shows, but I’ve seen some, I follow him on twitter and I am basically in awe every time that guy speaks. A couple of years ago, he changed my approach to the work that I do on diversity and inclusion when he said:
“Science and technology are the engines of the society of the future.”

If you know me, you know that I live too much on the future — yes, I do lots of mindfulness stuff but I’m just not quite there yet! — and when he said that something clicked in my mind. Technology, as we know permeates everything we do in our daily lives and it will become even more intrinsic to our life experience as individuals and as Humans. Today, the International Women’s Day, seems like a great day to talk about this topic, right?

So, if science and technology are the engines of the society of the future and…

If the STEM community is not diverse and inclusive, the majority of human beings that we call “minorities” in tech will not be represented and won’t have a voice. This means that:

1. Minorities won’t be able to contribute to the creation of the products nor have the decision power change things.
2. What we build will have a bigger potential to harm the humans that were not involved in the creation process.
3. Once again, due to the lack of representation and decision power, fixing the issues created by the latter point will be really hard to do, will take a lot of time and/or won’t be fixed properly.
4. We will basically continue to build the future to benefit a specific set of humans: male, cis gendered, white, from specific financial and educational backgrounds and who live in specific countries.

We are already seeing this happen time and time again…

• Cameras that wouldn’t take pictures of black people properly and this only changed when the chocolate and furniture industry pushed Kodak and other companies to improve this situation.
• Women and children were injured and killed by airbags because the team that built them only tested them for men.
• Facebook changing privacy policies affecting LGBTQ+ individuals that wanted to be part of their communities but couldn’t tell for instance their parents. Their families inadvertently found out and many had to face unfortunate situations, some were even expelled from their homes.
• Apple that did not include the menstruation cycle on their Health app and took *a year* to put it in there. The menstrual cycle is very important for women, especially if you want to get pregnant or check if you have a disease. For instance, this woman found out that she had cancer because she was tracking her menstrual cycle with Clue.
• Women in general that have problems with voice recognition (I have Google Home and this is very real. Sometimes I have to say the same thing 4 times and move next to it so that it can hear me, while my boyfriend can basically speak from wherever he feels like without issues. This makes me not use it.)
• Asian women have issues with iPhone’s *facial recognition*. However there are studies that show that this problem goes beyond than recognising Asian features, as it seems to be biased towards white men and affects other ethnicities in different ways.

And what about that Windows bot that was removed after 24h because she was basically taught to be sexist, racist, xenophobic and homophobic?

Let’s fix the problem right were it started

We hope to be human-centered, but if the team is not diverse AND inclusive, the odds are that your product will be a “small-percentage-of-humans-centered”.

I know you have all the best intentions. You believe that everyone should be considered equal and treated with respect and you even went to that Women In Tech event thing. But I’m afraid to say that it’s not enough. Why? Because:

1. Humans will always add their unconscious biases into what they build. That’s right, especially those unconscious biases that we are not aware of.
2. A team that is not diverse is unable to grasp the points of you that are needed to for the product to serve everyone.
3. A team that is not inclusive — even though it might be diverse — will never be able to benefit from the different points of view of its individuals.

When your team is representative of the audience that will be using the product, you’ll have way more chances to build something that will serve everyone. When your team is not representative of the audience, most of the time you’ll only realize that you failed after you launched the product.

And then the damage is already done and because the tech community is *so* about moving fast and breaking things, you just keep going and you end up adding more unsolved issues on top of other unsolved issues from the next iterations of your product. It just keeps on adding up.

This is so pervasive that lately, we have seen technology breaking our own humankind, — and shall I add human kindness with it as well?

Let’s start with awareness.

This is a real problem for our species. This is not a favour to the other 90% of humankind. Lack of diversity in tech is real and it has real and negative consequences. Please let that sink in. Talk about it and help other people realise its impact on today’s society and the future society.

And now it’s time for self-awareness.

This is a hard topic, but it needs to be mentioned. One of the hardest things to do as a human being is to look to ourselves and see that we probably weren’t as good-hearted as we thought we were, because without even realising we are fostering an unfair society and culture.

Information, empathy and self-awareness are key to this transition. It is the difference between a conversation and the development of a product that fits its user or it can create an awkward situation where you end up dismissing someone and creating a negative environment within the team — this already sucks and I didn’t even mention that part where your product didn’t work properly or hurt someone.

And then let’s do something about it. Together!

The good news is that there are many many ways to make this better!

You can help including more women, people of color, people with disabilities and other minorities into tech, whether you’re helping out at coding workshops or giving a tech toy to your daughter or niece.

You can also help creating an environment at tech in which they want to remain. Did you know that women leave the tech industry at a 45% higher rate than men?

At your workplace, you can talk with your manager or recruiting team and tell them that you believe that your team would benefit from being more inclusive — this could start a change on the recruiting process, where the goal is not hiring people because they are a minority, but to evaluate and train people to make sure that they are not being biased and probably some changes on the employer branding communication.

One last advice specific to men: if you assist any unfortunate comments or behaviours towards a minority, you need to use those opportunities to educate your friends or colleagues on the topic —this should happen independently if there aren’t any minorities present or not. By not saying anything, you’ll be fostering a toxic environment.

I am proud to say that at Feedzai, our Research and Data Science Team is well balanced in terms of gender. Our Engineering Team is making a lot of progress in this matter so we hope to tap into this topic in the future with new updates. :)

So, can we count on you?

“Creation without responsibility breeds destruction.”

Mike Monteiro, Mule Design Founder, author and speaker

It is our responsibility to help build better a society for everyone. If we, the builders are not building the world we actually want to live in, who is going to do it for us then?

Please clap if you agree and share this post if you believe other people should read this! Present and future generations thank you for your contribution. ❤