Racism within tech, and why we need to spot it

Unfortunately, there’s nothing new about racial bias within technology. Racism seeps through our industries alongside anything else built under white supremacy. Far from a dystopian future, robots and machine learning are already discriminating against Black people and People of Colour in our day-to-day interactions.

From photography to facial recognition, social media algorithms and more, here are four reasons why the tech sector desperately needs to welcome and nurture Black talent.

Automatic taps and hand sanitiser dispensers don’t recognise darker skin tones.

Especially in the time of Covid, it’s surprising that this issue wasn’t spotted earlier. But that’s the problem with non-diverse teams — they bring products to market that don’t work for the wider population. Substandard products can then fall through the gaps and win huge public tenders. This is a significant failing when, as we know, Black, Asian and other Ethnic Minority communities are more vulnerable to the virus outbreak for myriad other systemic reasons.

Facial Recognition emphasises bias.

Facial recognition technologies are increasingly used by police and security companies to profile suspects. For industries already imbued with racial discrimination at every level, the intersection of racism, technology and surveillance is a toxic one. This is especially troubling when combined by the use of matrix technology for “predictive policing”, which massively over targets Black men and boys, and those from Roma backgrounds.

Facial recognition is also shown to be incredibly inefficient, with as high as a 93% misidentification rate from use of live FR in Central London. Misidentification rates have been globally proven to be higher for people of colour, and particularly bad for Black women. Unsurprisingly, they’re most accurate for the demographic of people building the technology: white, middle-aged men. This ultimately leads to more adding of Black faces into mugshot databases, more false arrests, prosecutions, and potentially police violence.

Testing technology to the benefit of white populations is nothing new. When technologists were developing colour film, they used the “Shirley Card” as the benchmark for calibrating all other colours. The Shirley card was a picture of a white, brunette woman that effectively made photography of darker skin tones inferior in quality for decades, until 1995 when Kodak finally released a multiracial Shirley Card. It’s not hard to imagine the depth of impact on Black creatives, photographers and filmmakers for the decades of oversight.

There’s not enough diversity — at every level.

Machine learning passes on unconscious bias from the developers from which they learn. This is what happens when some of the biggest tech companies in Silicon Valley and beyond hire little to no Black people. A report this year concluded that 10 of the biggest tech firms featured on the The Silicon Valley Pain Index employed no Black women, and three companies had no Black employees at all.

Whilst Google and LinkedIn have a much more diverse workforce, with 46% of employees being white, white people still hold 70% of the executive positions. This is a stat that BYP Network is all too aware. The platform seeks to remedy this by holding a space for networking, leadership conferences and introductions to Black Young Professionals at managerial levels. This is especially important in the UK, where only 3% of the tech workforce are Black, and where the race pay gap is at 7.7% below the white average for Black employees and up to 20% for Bangladeshi communities.

Racist algorithms sexualise Black bodies.

Remember “free the nipple”? Thin, white, cis women mostly fronted the mid-2010s campaign that advocated for the desexualisation of breasts on Instagram. It seems they made paces, as (depending on your feed) it’s easy to scroll for a few minutes or click over to The Kardashians to see topless white breasts. But if you’re fat and Black, it’s a different matter.

After model Nyome Nicholas-Williams noticed that her topless pictures were repeatedly taken down, despite showing off less flesh than her white counterparts, she took matters into her own hands. Together her, photographer Alex Cameron and activist Gina Martin started to flood Instagram with images captioned #IwanttoseeNyome. Unsurprisingly, they kept being taken down, and Instagram’s racist bias became evident.

After talks with Instagram head office, it was revealed that the algorithm viewed cupped or squashed breasts as “pornographic”, and therefore was flagging larger breasts. After that, the process was subject to manual review, in which Instagram censors own racialised bias meant that Black women were potentially seen as more sexualised, a long and prevailing facet of White Supremacy. The good news? Last week Nyome and her allies got through to the tech giant and effectively changed Instagram’s global policy.

There is hope, and Black people in tech are pushing innovative and inspiring research and solutions left, right and centre. It’s up to everyone to become aware, set up and champion those solutions.

For more information about Black folks leading in tech read:

• 100 Black British Women Who Code
• Hustle Crew
• BYP Network
• Black Tech Awards was set up “to celebrate and acknowledge black role models and innovators within the tech sector”.
• Co-founder and head creative technologist of design invention studio Comuzi, Alex is doing incredible work in the AI space, raising awareness of the implications of algorithmic bias with regards to race and gender. They did a YH takeover last week.
• YSYS is a platform that connects. talented diverse people to the right opportunities in tech.
• Diverse and Equal is a community of industry professionals help to increase awareness of the careers available in Tech among people from under-represented groups