I’m trans and disabled, and I’d rather work with someone who thinks people like me shouldn’t exist but keeps their mouth shut about it at work than someone who thinks work is a great place to debate hot-button trans issues. Of course, other marginalized people may feel differently.
What if your company built a feature or product that inadvertently discriminated against trans or disabled people? Would you want someone to advocate for those groups? Would that discussion be deemed political?
What's an example of a product that would inadvertently discriminate against trans people?
What does it mean to inadvertently discriminate?
As an example, a lot of websites drop support for IE. If the makeup of IE users affected by it over-indexed on any particular type of race/gender/class/sexual orientation, would you classify that as inadvertent discrimination?
If a first version of a new website/product wasn't built to be perfectly compatible with accessibility standards, are they inadvertently discriminating against those with disabilities?
Are software bugs that may not be equally felt by all users an example of inadvertent discrimination?
Is the only way to not inadvertently discriminate to ensure products are built to be optimized for every single human and use case? Every edge case needs to be solved for before launch?
> As an example, a lot of websites drop support for IE. If the makeup of IE users affected by it over-indexed on any particular type of race/gender/class/sexual orientation, would you classify that as inadvertent discrimination?
It's likely that until recently (maybe), that IE users were more likely to use JAWS and accessibility tools than other groups, especially if they couldn't afford upgrades to newer releases of JAWS or were stuck on enterprise computers.
> If a first version of a new website/product wasn't built to be perfectly compatible with accessibility standards, are they inadvertently discriminating against those with disabilities?
Yes, if the site is inaccessible. That said it's harder to claim that a game designed for a touch screen is inaccessible and discriminates against accessible users who prefer keyboards, perhaps, due to the hardware they use. The game might work better on a touch screen, like Fruit Ninja and might be very hard to replicate without a touch screen.
> Software bugs that may not be equally felt
Maybe. If the bug was a recent introduction of a non-binary gender field and only those with non-binary genders were affected, it could be considered inadvertent discrimination. It can also be considered a bug. Its severity depends on how long the bug remains in the system. If it's pushing a year, that's more likely discrimination in addition to poor QA practices and a likely inability to listen to user feedback.
> Is the only way to not inadvertently discriminate to ensure products are built to be optimized for every single human and use case? Every edge case needs to be solved for before launch?
I think we need to keep in mind that just because something could be discrimination doesn't mean we can't forgive and move on. Mistakes are a fact of life, and nothing's perfect. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to aim for shipping fewer bugs, it means when we can, we fix the bugs, we listen to users, etc. It's very possible that one user's perfect app will in fact be completely wrong for another user, so pleasing everyone is impossible. It's why ergonomics has been so hard, humans aren't all the same height, etc.
Sometimes you need settings for users to adjust software to suit their preferences, such as font size. And sometimes you make font size part of the game, and it's not adjustable. If allowable under law, being inaccessible can be a choice, or it can be inadvertent. It's true some folks can get really worked up on a topic they care deeply about. It's also true that it's just software, and new software will come along eventually with different features that may please some audiences more. Or less. It all depends. :)
[Edit: Didn't see that you started answering my last question before I wrote this, about the operational implications of trying to eliminate everything that could be considered inadvertent discrimination. Going to just leave this comment as is, as I do think the utilitarian/deontological thinking about product development processes is an interesting quandary in today's climate :) ]
Given this thinking about inadvertent discrimination, and that the word 'discrimination' is very much coded as a 'bad' thing, what should be done about it?
Should any website/product that launches without being perfectly operable for every single user be sanctioned in some way? If not, aren't we supporting inadvertent discrimination? Isn't any allowance of inadvertent discrimination a bad thing?
Should there be some sort of utilitarian calculation with it? Or is it strictly a deontological thing? There can be no discrimination, therefore, we must not allow or we should disincentivize product development processes which release versions before they are equally workable for everyone?
I'd also point out that organizations can have incentives align with accessibility and inclusion rather than discrimination, accidental or otherwise.
For example, having a textual version of a video or image makes your page more optimized for basic search engines.
Now, of course, the same incentives could lead to dark patterns, lack of privacy, or even dividing people further, perhaps becoming a platform for divisiveness.
Personally, I think that we can identify and mark certain dark patterns as illegal, outright. We can encourage plugins and browser settings to enhance privacy. The hardest question is how much we need everything to be perfectly accessible and to not cause further discrimination or harm. That last one is difficult. I think ultimately the best answer we have is to classify some bad actors like we would dark patterns. This forum is an example of how rules and community can lead to better civil discourse online, but it's not necessarily as diverse as it could be due to those same rules. I think there will always be an unregulated middle ground where no one takes responsibility until they (a) have to and (b) understand how to, and that's especially true of government services at local and regional levels.
Not necessarily trans people. But there are plenty of tech products that inadvertently discriminated against Black people because of bad training data. The best known case is Google’s AI recognizing Black people as “gorillas”.
To this day, our home security system sometimes recognizes my big Black stepson as an “animal.”
Facial recognition that was used by law enforcement, mis recognized minorities far more than Whites.
If we're using that example of inadvertent discrimination, I think it's certainly feasible to have non-political discussion around improving it.
What you described sounds like a product flaw. Customers/users won't want to use a product that delivers sub-optimal results. Any internal employee saying "hey, we have an error rate of X% for this Y segment, and they represent Z% of the user base" isn't engaging in controversial political discussion (in my opinion).
However, if an individual chose to describe this flaw in more loaded language, it could easily turn political and combative for the team.
If the “customers” were law enforcement - who already racially profile on the flimsiest of excuses - that might be seen as a feature not a bug.
If AI/ML says someone “fits the description” what better feature than being able to blame it on the computer? If law enforcement was willing to deal with the flaw, and if tech companies were willing to sell it to them, what’s to stop an unscrupulous company from continuing to sell it if they didn’t get push back?
'Never' is a strong word and doing a lot of work here, and I don't think the counterfactual can be proved one way or another.
I do think your comment here, with an unprovable statement about an immutable characteristic, stated with absolute certainty, would invite toxic political discussions.
Speaking with humility, and honestly trying to improve processes to yield better results, is the type of communication that I advocate for on teams I'm involved with.
There is speaking with humility, then there is just being downright, purposefully naive.
Of course they never would have shipped it if it didn't recognize white faces. And the big isn't in the software, the bug is that the companies producing this stuff don't have a single solitary person of color either working on the product or testing it that would have certainly noticed that it doesn't work on them or said they were an animal, etc.
When I can, I try to point out “hey, we need to caption this” or “hey, I’m not sure this is accessible to visually impaired users” or “uh, these gender options suck”. Probably wouldn’t bring up my personal identity unless it was somehow relevant, which it rarely is in these kinds of discussions. I think it would be inappropriate to have a discussion about broader politics (“hey, what do you guys think of the bathroom bill?”) in this context — the thing that personally drives me up the wall is water-cooler conversation about politics like it’s a sport, when it’s unrelated to the product or the company.
This (among other reasons) is why I quit a previous job.
The head of the department would often use politics as small talk leading up to meetings while waiting for everyone to show up.
There was literally no safe way to engage in the conversation- disagree, and you paint a target on your back today, agree and have a target painted on your back tomorrow when someone else is in charge (not to mention alienating people who might currently be on your team).
I think you’re right that this is one of the biggest downsides. It’s possible to feel people out by how they react if I point out discrimination in the product, and if that goes badly I might consider leaving the company before discrimination against me becomes a problem. But I would also say that most of the discrimination I’ve experienced is not really overt enough to be a good early warning system. At some point it becomes irrelevant to wonder “am I not getting promoted because I have X marginalization, or is my work actually not great, or does this person just dislike me specifically for no reason”; better, in my experience, to consider it one of life’s mysteries and try to find a new job.
I think it’s hard to tell; people like me tend to not be heard a lot in these kinds of conversations. But I feel like there are enough of us that it’s better to exercise caution and specifically carve out opt-in spaces for political discussion if you really want them to exist — marginalized people often have a lot of trauma related to their marginalization and it’s easy to inadvertently hurt people with careless political discussion.
If my coworkers misgender me and aren’t amenable to correction, or otherwise overtly discriminate against me, I’m much more likely to quit and go elsewhere than to fight it.
I’m hard of hearing and need automatic meeting captions. At a company that uses Google Meet, these are free. If the company is on Zoom and needed to subscribe to a third-party transcription service, let’s say that’s maybe $25/month, which is a fraction of my hourly wage as an engineer. It’s possible for me to follow Zoom meetings without captions but presents a high enough cognitive load that 2-3 meetings in a day will exhaust my mental capacity to do engineering work for the rest of the day — so the cost of the month’s transcription service is at least an order of magnitude less than the cost to the company of forcing me to struggle through meetings.
I disagree that we should evaluate disability accommodations economically, but in this case the economic argument works out, too.
You need to believe that computers are understandable. There’s no magic involved. Eventually, every abstraction leaks — so if you have fear or learned helplessness blocking you from trying to understand the leaky abstraction layer, the only way you can debug it is by squeezing your eyes shut and trying random things, which is ineffective. You really need to internalize that even things that seem mysterious happen for reasons, and that those reasons are something you could in principle figure out.
Stars mostly look white to me (or very light yellow or blue) and I‘m fairly confident I have standard color vision — but I’m nearsighted and have mild strabismus, so they look pretty bad unless I’m using a telescope. :(
“Do people like me get to exist in public life” is often a hot topic of political discussion, but it’s not a discussion I’m interested in having or even hearing about at work. Not sure I’d consider this “privilege”.
As a member of several different marginalized groups, I want to be able to go to work and do my job without having to hear my coworkers argue about whether I get to exist. I’m well aware that politics doesn’t ignore me, but for my own sanity I don’t want to think about it any more than necessary, either.
I don’t have chat bubble “blindness” — I have configured my ad blocker to hide them, as well as any other clutter I find distracting. I wouldn’t be surprised if other users, rather than being blind to it, never even know the damn thing is there.
Learn to sew. And to repair and maintain your things more generally, but sewing seems much more overlooked than e.g. car maintenance in this thread, even though more people wear clothes than own cars. You can fix minor rips in your clothes quickly before they turn into major issues. You can do basic alterations by hand (e.g. hemming). I like to put loops in my towels so they hang better on hooks and to embroider my initials on cloth items I might lose. Recently, I repaired my roommate’s rocking chair — the seat is made of canvas, which had torn along a stress point, so I sewed it back together by hand using a thick piece of replacement canvas to add reinforcement. With a sewing machine, I was also able to make a weighted blanket (much cheaper than it would’ve been to buy) and a couple of cloth face masks. Learning a bit about garment construction and fabric properties will help you evaluate clothes, so you can tell if something won’t last just by looking at it in the store, so you can spend less time buying clothes. You can also learn enough about basic hand sewing to get started attaching fabric to other fabric in like 15 minutes.
Also, get some kind of physical hobby that doesn’t involve looking at a computer. It’s nice to spend some time on evenings and weekends not staring at a screen, and I find that doing things with my hands is grounding.
As is, this seems utterly useless for rinsing hair (particularly long hair), and it’s difficult to see how it can achieve broad adoption with this flaw. If there was a pushbutton that would turn on a “high flow” nozzle for 30 seconds at a time for hair-rinsing purposes, it would be much more functional.
How can I express a preference to have my managers discuss my mistakes over email, instead of by “gently pulling me aside” and talking in person? I am more comfortable expressing myself in non-real-time text format, especially with topics that feel hurtful. A paragraphs-long, detailed email explanation would be the best way for me to receive feedback!
