June 11, 2020
Crises make us fall back into old role models (1). The Corona crisis is no exception - numerous articles in the media have dealt with this topic over the past weeks (2). Due to the additional burden of household and educational work of women alongside working from home, experts fear a regression of equal rights. In hospitals, supermarkets or kindergartens, women, some of whom are underpaid, do a large part of the work and are thus exposed to an increased risk of infection. The risk of domestic violence increases because of social distancing measures. It is important that these gender-specific effects are publicly debated. We can see another problem that has been hardly discussed in relation to Corona but it is becoming even more severe due to the social changes resulting from the crisis - the under-representation of women in IT and tech.
Germany under pressure to innovate
All over the world, companies and administrations are forced to adapt. Companies require their employees to work from home, collaboration takes place online. Twitter has already announced that their employees do not have to return back to office even after the crisis. Authorities are digitizing their services, school lessons are being taught remotely with the help of learning apps and video conferences. Pupils who do not have access to technology at home are disadvantaged in terms of homeschooling. Digital solutions are also used to deal with the virus itself: Corona tracking apps are at the front line, and telemedicine is gaining support. In Japan, guests in quarantine hotels are welcomed by robots. Generally speaking, Corona further drives technologies to be integrated into all aspects of daily life. Germany has not really been a pioneer of digitalization in recent years. Germany in particular is therefore facing great pressure to innovate.
But who develops these innovations that shape our life and work?
In our book club we read “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez. Throughout her book, the author lists numerous studies that show the negative effects of homogeneous development teams on products. What happens when the female perspective is absent? It starts with little things: How often is the title “Mr.” pre-selected by default or “Mr.” positioned before “Ms.” in booking processes and forms. The word “interview partner” is marked as incorrect by the spell check of our text editor and corrected to “interview partner”. It continues with virtual assistants which, until recently, only had female voices and did not understand female voices as well as male voices. For example, in 2017, a study (3) concluded that voice recognition softwares can understand women’s voices less well than men’s. This will continue to happen as long as the voice corpora, used to train the AI, mainly consists of one-sided data. Algorithms can reinforce prejudices and stereotypes if the data they are fed with reflect existing sexism in society - then, for example, images of men rather than women will be the first results in search engines when googling the word “career”. It gets more serious in terms of women’s health: Symptoms of certain diseases differ from those of men, such as heart attacks - many women experience “unspecific” symptoms such as nausea or pain in the head instead of pain in the chest and arm (4). Apparently, significant gaps exist in the knowledge about the female body. If even doctors do not possess enough knowledge on the female body, how are artificial intelligence supposed to make diagnoses?
Various product development teams are needed to uncover unconscious thought patterns. Until 2016, Siri did not know what it meant to be raped - now she can suggest the telephone number of police and aid organisations. If Smart Cities are designed exclusively by people who live with someone that takes care of the household and children, the needs of those people are risked to be neglected. The more space technology takes up in our society, the more it is important that women are involved in making these decisions. The needs of half the population should not be forgotten.
The Corona crisis is a major challenge and is also changing the way we work. The IT and tech sector continues to gain social relevance. We continuously work to ensure that all genders have an equal influence on the design of future technologies and are glad about every support. Let us know if you have any ideas how we can help you during this time! Finally, we must not forget: opportunities present themselves and a crisis holds opportunities for positive change.
Sources:
(1) Criado-Perez, Caroline: “Unsichtbare Frauen - Wie eine von Daten beherrschte Welt die Hälfte der Bevölkerung ignoriert”, btb, München, 2020, S. 382 (2) zum Beispiel Unbekannt: Corona: Eine Krise der Frauen, 12.05.2020; url: https://www.unwomen.de/helfen/helfen-sie-frauen-in-der-corona-krise/corona-eine-krise-der-frauen.html ODER Allmendinger, Jutta: Die Frauen verlieren ihre Würde, 12.05.2020; url: https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2020-05/familie-corona-krise-frauen-rollenverteilung-rueckentwicklung (Zugriff: 11.06.2020) (3) Gender and Dialect Bias in YouTube’s Automatic Captions https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-1606.pdf (4) Saini, Angela: “Inferior - The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It”, 4th Estate, London, 2017, S. 59f