Merging Ethics and Technology
How Kathy Pham is creating a world where technology isn’t about the product, it’s about the user
When we last talked to Kathy Pham in 2016, she was merging her passion for technology and healthcare while working at the United States Digital Service (USDS). Today, Kathy continues to make the world of tech a better place than where she found it. Kathy feels that working for USDS allowed her to truly reflect on the importance of intersectionality and user experience. Her life, as the daughter of Vietnamese refugees, as a tech professional, and as someone whose mother had been affected by cancer, allowed her to consider the United States health and technology initiatives from a unique perspective.
“[Working at the United States Digital Service] was what it really meant to bring your whole self to work. Bringing my whole self from tech, from product, from engineering, from Immigrant Refugee parents, from cancer, finding all of it in one place.”
After three years in the public sector working with United States Digital Service, Kathy got a lot of perspective on the role of technology within our society and how our personal experiences can drive our work. Though she is still passionate about health, she has shifted her professional focus to ethics. After leaving the USDS, Kathy decided to further explore intersectional perspectives in tech as an Assembly Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. Through this fellowship, she participated in a four month incubator with a focus on Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence in regards to the intersection of communities and AI. Through her research, she collaborated with professionals from vastly different disciplines, including history, political science, human rights theory, and philosophy. Kathy realizes this allowed her to understand these interdisciplinary perspectives on technology and inform how she thinks about the impact of her projects.
Kathy has dedicated the last few years to discussing the impact of product development and society. She is currently an adjunct professor at Harvard University, teaching courses on Product Management and Society. Her courses train students on how to be aware and receptive to the impact of race, gender, and other social factors on their products. Kathy’s work focuses on making the user and their unique experience the navigator for developing inclusive and powerful products. To create resources for others to understand these concepts, she is a fellow at the Shorenstein Center. At the Shorenstein Center, she develops research and case studies centered on the topic of “Product and Society”.
“I teach basic concepts of Product Management. So everything from discovery sprints to metrics to product market fit to user experience research. But in every single one of those classes, I integrate concepts of race and equity and inequality. If we’re doing discovery sprints, who’s missing from your conversation? If you’re doing user experience research, who should you bring into the room? If you’re tracking code engagement, what does that really mean?”
As if her work at Harvard wasn’t enough, Kathy is also a fellow with Mozilla. At Mozilla, she co-founded and currently advises the Mozilla Builders Fix the Internet Incubator, an incubator focused on supporting businesses with a positive impact on society. In hopes of expanding education that merges technology and ethics beyond her teaching at Harvard, she co-leads Mozilla Responsible Computer Science, a challenge for schools to conceptualize and develop plans on how to integrate ethics curriculum into engineering academics. This program has been involved in supporting 17 different schools as they evolve their curriculum to include ethic studies.
Kathy’s career has focused on integrating all voices into product development. Her advice for womxn interested in technology is to not undervalue your own voice. Your unique experiences can help solve problems that the current world of tech hasn’t even realized exist yet.
“Assert your own voice. All of your experiences, whether they’re lived experiences are learned experiences, are just as valuable to teams and products. We know that because tech companies with tens and hundreds of thousands of employees are not doing it right. So the experiences that you bring in, as someone who’s new with our own experiences, are incredibly valuable to technology right now. They help us figure out what to build and [solve problems we haven’t thought of yet]”
This story was written by Natalia Gutierrez, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with her on Linkedin. Support our mission to celebrate more amazing women in tech, like the one featured here, by donating to AnitaB.org.
