Apps
In the tech world, the implicit assumption that men are the default human remains king. When Apple launched its health-monitoring system with much fanfare in 2014, it boasted a ‘comprehensive’ health tracker. It could track blood pressure; steps taken; blood alcohol level; even molybdenum and copper intake. But as many women pointed out at the time, they forgot one crucial detail: a period tracker.
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When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap. Products marketed as gender-neutral that are in fact biased towards men are rife across the (male-dominated) tech industry. From smartwatches that are too big for women’s wrists, to map apps that fail to account for women’s desire for ‘safest’ in addition to ‘fastest’ routes; to ‘measure how good you are at sex’ apps called ‘iThrust’ and ‘iBang’.
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Whitney Erin Boesel, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, is a member of the ‘quantified self’ community, which promises ‘self- knowledge through numbers’. These numbers are often collected via passive tracking apps on your phone, the classic being how many steps you’ve taken that day. But there’s a pocket-sized problem with this promise: ‘Inevitably some dude gets up at a conference and [says] something about how your phone is always on you,’ Boesel told the . ‘And every time I’ll stand up, and I’ll be like, “Hi, about this phone that is always on you. This is my phone. And these are my pants.”’
Designing passive tracking apps as if women have pockets big enough to hold their phones is a perennial problem with an easy solution: include proper pockets in women’s clothing. In the meantime, however, women use other solutions, and if tech developers don’t realise women are being forced into workarounds, they may fail in their development.
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