i wouldn't blame the technical team for lack of "social diversity" if a stock trading app lacked an important feature.
I would instead blame it on the people specifying the product features for not knowing their market ( and that usually is someone like a product owner).
Note that i clearly agree that having more people inside the company actually representing the target audience is a plus, but that's just a general rule, it doesn't apply specifically to having more women in tech team ( which i think is a nice idea, if only because tech is an interesting field to work in and women shouldn't miss this opportunity)
So who’s to blame for more women dying in car crashes than men because there were no female crash test dummies?
Don’t you think that having women on the development teams might have helped catch the fact that voice recognition software didn’t recognize female voices before the software ever made it to QA, rather than after release?
About car crash dummies: i know nothing about that field, but i suppose crash test dummies are build to represent the "most average human being", gender neutral. The fact that women are a subcategory that require specially manufactured dummies is i think a scientific discovery. Not something the average person would have guessed... I suppose there are other subcategories ( obese peopl, old people, short people) that probably would benefit for custom made crash test..
On female voices not being recognized i'd like you to show me the article that tell this story, because it seems so obvious that i'm having a hard time believing it ( looks like something as obvious as understanding people speaking with different accents).
But that just the thing. When only or mostly men are involved, “gender neutral” ends up being masculine (like the crash test dummies that had height and weight distributions like average men, not like average humans) because that’s our societal default. “Oh, women are a special subcategory.” No, we’re not. We’re half the fucking population.
Let's take the car dummy example. Do you think gender is one of the most relevant distinction if you'd really want to dig interesting clues from your team, that professionals wouldn't have thought of ?
If i were a team leader honestly i wouldn't care about gender first. I'd be more interested in recruiting people from different weights, sizes, ages, maybe even races, and medical backgrounds first. And then, maybe gender would come into play.
For some problems gender is an important factor, for others it's not. The fact that this "gender" predicate divides the world into two half doesn't make it relevant per say. I could divide between blue eyes and brown eyes, or skin tan, or lactose tolerant, etc, and come up with fairmy big chunks.
Now I do agree that differences between men and women are indeed so important that it's an very interesting criteria in many topics. Although for some reason i don't think that's the argument you want to base your reasoning upon.
Maybe there would have been more testing on female voices if there were more female engineers, but that is sort of ancillary solution to a problem of poor product design and testing.
It also fails to address the underlying problem that there are simply nowhere near an equal number of available female engineers as male engineers. Shooting for a goal of 50:50 ratio when that is not anywhere close to the ratio of the available candidates makes it mathematically impossible to not make other sacrifices...for what objective?
Your claim is that there are things that female engineers bring to the table that male engineers do not. My claim is that there is nothing a male engineer can do on the basis of their gender that a female cannot, and the inverse is equally true. In fact, I can't imagine a more offensive argument than saying "we need more female engineers so that our app is better at handling women's periods."
Did I say 50-50. I’m saying we should care about having any. Maybe male engineers and product owners could pay attention to female voices and menstrual science. But they didn’t. It’s much less likely that a woman working on these products would miss those issues.
How would female crash test dummies address the problem of women dying in car crashes more often than men? For any given car, women crashing in that car will die more often than men crashing in the same car, because women are much more fragile than men. Dummies will only let you measure the effect.
It isn't really a case of "more fragile", but different body shapes, different center of gravity, and so on. Not to mention that if you are talking averages, the "average" test dummy could easily be built taller, with more muscle mass and a bit less regular fat (even at healthy weights) than the average woman is simply because men would tip the scale a bit upwards. I imagine these things cause differences in the way folks move in accidents.
Airbags, for example: If breasts tend to get in the way, then the airbags aren't going to be as helpful for women or, alternatively, cause more harm to women simply because of breasts (I'm speculating the example, I don't know it to be true).
> i wouldn't blame the technical team for lack of "social diversity" if a stock trading app lacked an important feature.
I would. If you're building a stock trading app, why on earth shouldn't you hire at least one or two people on your design/development team that actually trade stocks and have experience with the current market?
It's not even a question of social diversity; it's just that you'll catch so many problems if you do - I can't count the number of times at my last job we ran into technical decisions about performance and algorithms where we didn't know what the right decision was because our dev team wasn't familiar with how the software would be used.
You can't user-test architecture, at least not without very long, very costly development cycles and refactors. It's valuable to be able to catch problems early. Even at a purely technical level, having a dev team that's unfamiliar with what you're building is a recipe for disaster.
If the company is big enough, complaining loudly to your readership is often the fastest way to report a bug and to get someone who can actually do something to look at it.
Take a look at the most recent web audio stuff that happened in Chrome. Bugs had been sitting open in the tracker for months before the code got pushed into stable - dev team didn't do anything about it until prominent developers started calling them out publicly on Twitter and news sites started reporting on it.
As a smaller example, I used to do API level maintenance on a software stack. I didn't get to prioritize whatever bugs I wanted - upper management did. I actually advised people who had breaking bugs not to just file something in the tracker, because I couldn't guarantee that I would be able to take time to fix it. On top of filing an issue, I told teams that had serious problems that they should go to a manager and explain that it was going to make them miss a release deadline.
Then I'd be allowed to take time off of the more flashy features that looked good in press releases to fix their problem.
There is at least a decent chance that somewhere on the Fitbit engineering team, someone is reading that article and saying, "finally we get to address this #?&x$ issue because now it's public enough to care about."
> I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers
Yeah, they should, because female testers are more likely to catch problems that will effect females. They should also hire blind testers to catch accessibility problems. They should also hire runners and joggers to test if their tracking is accurate in normal usage.
I'm not sure if you meant this as a joke, having people who are similar to your end users test your product is basically business 101.
Seriously, I don't know why this is such a hard problem for people.
"We're building tax software. Should we get a tax consultant to look it over and identify problems?"
"We're building a programming IDE. Should we get some programmers on our design team? Should we maybe eat our own dog food and have our programmers use it internally for development?"
"We're building a screen reader. Should our QA team have some blind testers on it?"
"We're building a product that we're marketing to women. Should women be involved in building it?"
Sure you can get around these issues by doing extra market research, but in basically every other area of development we understand that it is an asset to have your designers and builders be intimately familiar with the problems you're trying to solve. The cheapest, most efficient way to make your design team intimately familiar with problems that women face is to hire women.
It's no different than hiring security experts if you're building serverside software - you want some people on your team to be an early voice of reason; to be able to raise their hand early in a code review or a tech demo and say, "Hey, just so you know that's an XSS attack vector," or, "Hey, just so you know I've actually had periods that last longer than 10 days."
"Fitbit isn’t the only tech giant to have big gaps in their understanding of women’s lives. Journalist Alexandra Heminsley noticed that neither Apple Watch nor Fitbit let you log pushing a pram as exercise, despite the fact that everything from barre to Zumba was there already"
For the record I don't actually care. I was mocking the current victim hood culture and this article follows very similar language patterns.
Ok. I personally don't think that's a female activity, but I take your point that others might.
That said, I don't have any children of my own. As such, I only have a vague idea about the challenges involved. I am without a doubt, ignorant to the reality of child rearing.
"Journalist Alexandra Heminsley noticed that neither Apple Watch nor Fitbit let you log pushing a pram as exercise, despite the fact that everything from barre to Zumba was there already. Jogging prams are absolutely everywhere now...and yet, according to Apple and Fitbit, it’s not happening.”
As a runner and a parent, this might annoy me. However, is it really a sign of (concious or unconscious) sexism? Don’t men run with prams in the US?
I see people with pushchairs regularly at the local park runs, both female and male individuals who are there on their own (with child, obviously) or in one case a couple who take it in turns to take the stroller or try for a PB.
I think I see more solo men than solo women with pushchairs, though I've not paid that much attention so I might be noticing the men more due to them standing out to me because they breach some subconscious expectation/bias. Or maybe I notice more due to jealousy: one of the regulars is usually a minute or two faster than my best even with the pushchair!
(context for reference: I'm in the UK, and a middle-aged, single, happily childless, male)
Our local Park Run has two or three men who regularly run around with pushchairs, at least one of whom gets admirably impressive times. I have never seen a woman do it. There are usually a couple of hundred people running.
Yeah, if pushing a pram is seen as a stereotypically “female” activity and because of tat further outside the lived reality of the men writing the software, then it could be sexism.
I do agree, though, that this is more generally something indicating that diversity in teams working on software all kinds of people use is important. I think a father could just as well have helped out here, because I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t immediately think of pushing the pram as an activity you want to track if you were a parent heavily involved with your child. It’s obvious, really.
I push a pram every day but I think of it as "walking" not "pushing a pram", if I was working on this feature it would not be obvious to me to include it as a separate activity.
I don't have much experience with activity trackers though. Do they also have option for if you're carrying a backpack or not, and other similar minor consequential details?
(On the Apple Watch) the different activities use different algorithms to estimate your calorie burn. I would guess that hiking gives you a higher burn rate for the same speed to account for possibly more difficult terrain and carrying a backpack.
I don’t know this for certain. I’ve never tried to use the hiking algorithm on my walking path to compare them.
Walking is usually on a finished, somewhat flat surface. Hiking - even in flat areas - generally have obstacles and uneven surfaces. Tree roots, branches with thorns, and so on. It isn't uncommon to do a bit of a climb either. If I'm in a good enough area, I might personally be crossing a stream on rocks. I'm guessing this has different output in the device: Steps taken hiking might not equal that on a walk, for instance, but may (in general) burn more calories.
> if pushing a pram is seen as a stereotypically “female” activity and because of tat further outside the lived reality of the men writing the software, it could be sexism
So one would need to make sexist assumptions about activities (only females push prams) to interpret a sexist intent on the side of the coders (I don't like females, so no pushing pram activity!)? But isn't that kind of a circular logic requiring sexism itself to work?
What about pushing a shopping cart? Carrying your groceries up to the 6th floor, where are the activities for that?
Are they missing because of all the coders never shopping themselves?
Imho this has much more to do with the threshold of "what constitutes a track-worthy activity?", there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of rather mundane activities that could be added for tracking, because if you up the resolution enough even breathing is burning calories.
I don’t know if it’s sexism or not but is it possible that Fitbit and Apple Watch aren’t so good at tracking your movement/steps when your arms are stable whilst pushing a pram? I think a lot of the data comes from your vertical movement as you walk.
I would not be surprised if other activities were missing also. Why do we have to assume that everything missing is gender specific?
On the other hand it would be a big surprise for me if the people that designed the Fitbit's period tracking feature did not include or at least consulted women.
Something else that surprised me is the bit about crash test dummies. I found it difficult to believe that no female dummies existed. A quick search showed that in fact dummies modelling females exist since the 70s. However it seems they were derived from the male dummies.
It seems it really took many more years to design a female dummy from the ground up (although I found articles from at least 2006 about it).
I'd guess the simplest explanation is that pushing a stroller isn't an activity already categorized in one of the standard calories per hour exercise charts that everybody uses.
Never attribute something to maliciousness when laziness can explain the phenomenon equally well.
The other opposing force to including everything is user interface design and usability.
You don't want to put too many irrelevant things in the menu or list of activities you can log, goal you can pursue, or questions you must answer.
The system can filter out some things that don't apply to you, like only suggesting pram jogging if you have small kids, but then it has to ask if you have small kids to know that, and it might leave out people who help take care of other people's kids. So should it also ask about those personal details? Should it ask for your home's geolocation so it can check if you live on a steep street, before suggesting you pedal your kids around in a Bakfiets, so it doesn't accidentally give you advice that leads to a heart attack?
So you have to balance what you put in with how much the system needs to know about you, and how many irrelevant questions and suggestions it's going to throw at you.
I work on an online diabetes prevention system [1] that lets you select goals and log physical activities including various kinds of exercise. It doesn't include pram jogging (which I never heard of before, so I read it as "param jogging", which sounds to me like a cool Python function decorator technique).
That's a great idea that's new to me, and I'm thankful to the author for pointing it out, and I'll suggest we add it. (In the Netherlands where it's flat, parents pedal their kids around in a Bakfiets. [2])
The program's content was mostly designed by a woman [3], so I don't think omitting pram jogging was a sexist decision on her part -- it's more that you can't think of everything, or keep up with every new trend that's happening (and if you try, the menus are way too long so the user interface is difficult to use).
I agree with the article that it's outrageously patronizing and sexist for Fitbit to tell women how soon they must get over their periods!
I certainly see a lot more women running with prams than men on the trail near me. The majority of childcare is still overwhelmingly handled by women.
> However, is it really a sign of (concious or unconscious) sexism?
This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a sexist culture where women are either deterred from entering certain careers/sectors or forced to leave. If you don't have a lot of women around, you probably won't notice as many things that disproportionately affect women.
There are many things about this article that I really dislike.
1.) The implication that a statistical outlier not being represented is something that would have been fixed by having more female engineers.
How much of an outlier is it for a woman to have a period exceeding 10 days in length? 1 in 15? 1 in 100? Is it not relevant? Would the 14/15 women who are not themselves these statistical outliers be roughly just as likely as men to lack this information? Presumably they would have a chance to be exposed to it by family/friends/relationships, but isn't that the same for the men? This sounds like either a problem with the FitBit team having not done proper research, or this being such a statistical outlier that it's an understandable mistake. Do the programmers on a diabetes bloodsugar reader need to themselves have diabetes, or is it not reasonable to suggest that they should instead be as well informed as needed to build the product?
2.) The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do with anything other than...the lack of female engineers.
3.) The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every application for the general public. If there was a nutritional application that didn't account for Celiac's disease, or a running app that didn't properly accommodate somebody's asthma, I'm not so sure that the right idea is to determine that this app needs to cover all such cases. There are market forces at work here, if there is a need for it, i.e. asthmatic runners who are unsatisfied with XYZ apps, then there is an opportunity. If you have longer-than-10 day periods, and FitBit doesn't change, you have a market opportunity. If it doesn't do well...there wasn't enough of a market. Or I guess we can just demand that all apps are built by diabetic asthmatic women to cover our bases.
Who wants to actually set up a startup and do all that work when complaining on Twitter or a blog will get your more validation with none of the effort or risk?
> "Early voice-recognition software didn't always recognise female voices,” she says. “None of the developers had been female and no one thought to test out the technology on women.”
So why didn't women build voice-recognition software? Developing software is not a regulated activity.
It's simple to complain from the sidelines [edit: or push down-vote buttons].
One of the reasons for period tracking is identifying changes to one's menstrual cycle, which may indicate health issues.[1] So even if periods normally were to only last up to 10 days, not allowing to track for a longer period would impede that goal. In fact, this is even one the vague reasons Fitbit mentioned when it launched this functionality. [2] The functionality feels like a bit of an afterthought.
As a female engineer and a feminist, if I were implementing this feature I would have obviously known that periods can last forever. Unfortunately given that Fitbit's engineering team is majority male, some male engineer is probably going to push a fix in response to this article that removes the explicit upper limit on period length while still using an int32 or int64 to represent it instead of using a big integer type as they should to represent periods lasting over 9,223,372,036,854,775,807 days which is possible if you are a really, really hardcore feminist.
This is the kind of humour that we should be able to enjoy here. Accept the patch allowing unlimited period lengths and laugh at this joke. Why does everything have to be so serious and flagged/downvoted etc.?
Women like this who hate men should just stop using technology created by men. Start with things like Fitbit that you don't actually need. Then work up to cars and other things. Show us how it's done because we clearly don't know how to do it.
At no point do I get the feeling that the author hates me. This feature sounds like no one who actually has a period (or maybe even knows someone who has them???) was involved at any stage.
I think you have more to get over than the author.
The author has made every effort to make it about men vs women, rather than just her vs Fitbit.
I've "known" a great many women but had no idea a period could last a month. Even if it was built entirely by virgin men who really are clueless there is no reason for the tone in the article. If I don't know something, just tell me. Don't write a passive aggressive piece because I don't know about that period you had 2016.
You're not meeting the standards of discourse on this site. Because we've asked you many times to fix this, we've banned the account. We're happy to unban accounts if you email us at hn@ycombinator.com and we believe you'll use the site as intended.
The line which researchers here in Sweden define that a profession is gender segregated is if it has less than 40% of a single gender. It comes out to about 90% of the population, both men and women, work in gender segregated professions and only 10% work in the remaining gender equal professions which would include professional designers.
If we set the bar higher than a minimum of 40% then we are quickly going into single digit percent of the population. There is very few professions with an exact 50/50 ratio.
What is interesting, is this reply to the tweet mentioned in the article (https://twitter.com/JeremiahLee/status/1025424090184728576) where this former(?) fitbit employee says that actually there were women involved in this feature.
Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.
Thank you for bringing attention to this very important point. From the tweet:
"FWIW this feature was led by women (product manager, head of product, engineering manager). I am not defending the design & I understand that it fails to meet your expectations. Fitbit isn't that big and the people there care a lot about helping people."
A later reply by a current employee: "Also, the algorithm development was led by a woman."
This is just another software flaw, not a demonstration of rampant sexism. I'd ask commenters here (in general, not replying to the parent comment) to curb their outrage. And if things like this really bother you, apply to one of our many open positions.
Yeah, as I said before in another comment I would be surprised "if the people that designed the Fitbit's period tracking feature did not include or at least consulted women".
I take your comment (and the tweet I linked) as being correct about my assumption.
As a non-American (I am European) I am always amazed about how easily things like that are attributed to gender (non) inclusion in the USA. On the other hand, as a male I have to always wonder if I find these kind of reactions over the top not because I am not American but because of my gender.
In this particular case, the problem is that everybody thinks that if you include women you'll get menstruation right. This applies both to Fitbit assuming we didn't need to consult a gynecologist, and to outsiders assuming Fitbit must not have put women on the project.
More generally, there is a lot of sexism, at least in the U.S., which makes people more inclined to see it everywhere...it's a natural human bias.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadI would instead blame it on the people specifying the product features for not knowing their market ( and that usually is someone like a product owner).
Note that i clearly agree that having more people inside the company actually representing the target audience is a plus, but that's just a general rule, it doesn't apply specifically to having more women in tech team ( which i think is a nice idea, if only because tech is an interesting field to work in and women shouldn't miss this opportunity)
Don’t you think that having women on the development teams might have helped catch the fact that voice recognition software didn’t recognize female voices before the software ever made it to QA, rather than after release?
On female voices not being recognized i'd like you to show me the article that tell this story, because it seems so obvious that i'm having a hard time believing it ( looks like something as obvious as understanding people speaking with different accents).
If i were a team leader honestly i wouldn't care about gender first. I'd be more interested in recruiting people from different weights, sizes, ages, maybe even races, and medical backgrounds first. And then, maybe gender would come into play.
For some problems gender is an important factor, for others it's not. The fact that this "gender" predicate divides the world into two half doesn't make it relevant per say. I could divide between blue eyes and brown eyes, or skin tan, or lactose tolerant, etc, and come up with fairmy big chunks.
Now I do agree that differences between men and women are indeed so important that it's an very interesting criteria in many topics. Although for some reason i don't think that's the argument you want to base your reasoning upon.
https://makingnoiseandhearingthings.com/2016/07/12/googles-s...
AI/ML inherits the bias from it's trainers - this is pretty well accepted.
It also fails to address the underlying problem that there are simply nowhere near an equal number of available female engineers as male engineers. Shooting for a goal of 50:50 ratio when that is not anywhere close to the ratio of the available candidates makes it mathematically impossible to not make other sacrifices...for what objective?
Your claim is that there are things that female engineers bring to the table that male engineers do not. My claim is that there is nothing a male engineer can do on the basis of their gender that a female cannot, and the inverse is equally true. In fact, I can't imagine a more offensive argument than saying "we need more female engineers so that our app is better at handling women's periods."
Airbags, for example: If breasts tend to get in the way, then the airbags aren't going to be as helpful for women or, alternatively, cause more harm to women simply because of breasts (I'm speculating the example, I don't know it to be true).
I would. If you're building a stock trading app, why on earth shouldn't you hire at least one or two people on your design/development team that actually trade stocks and have experience with the current market?
It's not even a question of social diversity; it's just that you'll catch so many problems if you do - I can't count the number of times at my last job we ran into technical decisions about performance and algorithms where we didn't know what the right decision was because our dev team wasn't familiar with how the software would be used.
You can't user-test architecture, at least not without very long, very costly development cycles and refactors. It's valuable to be able to catch problems early. Even at a purely technical level, having a dev team that's unfamiliar with what you're building is a recipe for disaster.
I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers to avoid Twitter mobs.
A report may or may not result in a fix. A post like that might accelerate progress there (given some reach).
Take a look at the most recent web audio stuff that happened in Chrome. Bugs had been sitting open in the tracker for months before the code got pushed into stable - dev team didn't do anything about it until prominent developers started calling them out publicly on Twitter and news sites started reporting on it.
As a smaller example, I used to do API level maintenance on a software stack. I didn't get to prioritize whatever bugs I wanted - upper management did. I actually advised people who had breaking bugs not to just file something in the tracker, because I couldn't guarantee that I would be able to take time to fix it. On top of filing an issue, I told teams that had serious problems that they should go to a manager and explain that it was going to make them miss a release deadline.
Then I'd be allowed to take time off of the more flashy features that looked good in press releases to fix their problem.
There is at least a decent chance that somewhere on the Fitbit engineering team, someone is reading that article and saying, "finally we get to address this #?&x$ issue because now it's public enough to care about."
> I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers
Yeah, they should, because female testers are more likely to catch problems that will effect females. They should also hire blind testers to catch accessibility problems. They should also hire runners and joggers to test if their tracking is accurate in normal usage.
I'm not sure if you meant this as a joke, having people who are similar to your end users test your product is basically business 101.
"We're building tax software. Should we get a tax consultant to look it over and identify problems?"
"We're building a programming IDE. Should we get some programmers on our design team? Should we maybe eat our own dog food and have our programmers use it internally for development?"
"We're building a screen reader. Should our QA team have some blind testers on it?"
"We're building a product that we're marketing to women. Should women be involved in building it?"
Sure you can get around these issues by doing extra market research, but in basically every other area of development we understand that it is an asset to have your designers and builders be intimately familiar with the problems you're trying to solve. The cheapest, most efficient way to make your design team intimately familiar with problems that women face is to hire women.
It's no different than hiring security experts if you're building serverside software - you want some people on your team to be an early voice of reason; to be able to raise their hand early in a code review or a tech demo and say, "Hey, just so you know that's an XSS attack vector," or, "Hey, just so you know I've actually had periods that last longer than 10 days."
Sexism can also include paying less attention or being ignorant of stereotypically “female” activities.
That, in practice, pushing a pram is not at all gender specific doesn’t matter here, it’s the stereotype that does.
"Fitbit isn’t the only tech giant to have big gaps in their understanding of women’s lives. Journalist Alexandra Heminsley noticed that neither Apple Watch nor Fitbit let you log pushing a pram as exercise, despite the fact that everything from barre to Zumba was there already"
For the record I don't actually care. I was mocking the current victim hood culture and this article follows very similar language patterns.
What is a stereotypically female activity?
That said, I don't have any children of my own. As such, I only have a vague idea about the challenges involved. I am without a doubt, ignorant to the reality of child rearing.
Does that make me sexist?
So it's sexist to not stereotype but also sexist to stereotype. Got it.
You do know that when you argue in bad faith it's immediately obvious, don't you?
As a runner and a parent, this might annoy me. However, is it really a sign of (concious or unconscious) sexism? Don’t men run with prams in the US?
I think I see more solo men than solo women with pushchairs, though I've not paid that much attention so I might be noticing the men more due to them standing out to me because they breach some subconscious expectation/bias. Or maybe I notice more due to jealousy: one of the regulars is usually a minute or two faster than my best even with the pushchair!
(context for reference: I'm in the UK, and a middle-aged, single, happily childless, male)
I do agree, though, that this is more generally something indicating that diversity in teams working on software all kinds of people use is important. I think a father could just as well have helped out here, because I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t immediately think of pushing the pram as an activity you want to track if you were a parent heavily involved with your child. It’s obvious, really.
I don't have much experience with activity trackers though. Do they also have option for if you're carrying a backpack or not, and other similar minor consequential details?
I don’t know this for certain. I’ve never tried to use the hiking algorithm on my walking path to compare them.
Walking is usually on a finished, somewhat flat surface. Hiking - even in flat areas - generally have obstacles and uneven surfaces. Tree roots, branches with thorns, and so on. It isn't uncommon to do a bit of a climb either. If I'm in a good enough area, I might personally be crossing a stream on rocks. I'm guessing this has different output in the device: Steps taken hiking might not equal that on a walk, for instance, but may (in general) burn more calories.
So one would need to make sexist assumptions about activities (only females push prams) to interpret a sexist intent on the side of the coders (I don't like females, so no pushing pram activity!)? But isn't that kind of a circular logic requiring sexism itself to work?
What about pushing a shopping cart? Carrying your groceries up to the 6th floor, where are the activities for that? Are they missing because of all the coders never shopping themselves?
Imho this has much more to do with the threshold of "what constitutes a track-worthy activity?", there are probably hundreds, if not thousands, of rather mundane activities that could be added for tracking, because if you up the resolution enough even breathing is burning calories.
Maybe they just can’t track it.
On the other hand it would be a big surprise for me if the people that designed the Fitbit's period tracking feature did not include or at least consulted women.
Something else that surprised me is the bit about crash test dummies. I found it difficult to believe that no female dummies existed. A quick search showed that in fact dummies modelling females exist since the 70s. However it seems they were derived from the male dummies. It seems it really took many more years to design a female dummy from the ground up (although I found articles from at least 2006 about it).
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Never attribute something to maliciousness when laziness can explain the phenomenon equally well.
You don't want to put too many irrelevant things in the menu or list of activities you can log, goal you can pursue, or questions you must answer.
The system can filter out some things that don't apply to you, like only suggesting pram jogging if you have small kids, but then it has to ask if you have small kids to know that, and it might leave out people who help take care of other people's kids. So should it also ask about those personal details? Should it ask for your home's geolocation so it can check if you live on a steep street, before suggesting you pedal your kids around in a Bakfiets, so it doesn't accidentally give you advice that leads to a heart attack?
So you have to balance what you put in with how much the system needs to know about you, and how many irrelevant questions and suggestions it's going to throw at you.
That's a great idea that's new to me, and I'm thankful to the author for pointing it out, and I'll suggest we add it. (In the Netherlands where it's flat, parents pedal their kids around in a Bakfiets. [2])
The program's content was mostly designed by a woman [3], so I don't think omitting pram jogging was a sexist decision on her part -- it's more that you can't think of everything, or keep up with every new trend that's happening (and if you try, the menus are way too long so the user interface is difficult to use).
I agree with the article that it's outrageously patronizing and sexist for Fitbit to tell women how soon they must get over their periods!
[1] https://turnaroundhealth.com/
[2] https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/2010/06/bakfiets-is-au...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_PS3lzlqpg
I certainly see a lot more women running with prams than men on the trail near me. The majority of childcare is still overwhelmingly handled by women.
> However, is it really a sign of (concious or unconscious) sexism?
This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a sexist culture where women are either deterred from entering certain careers/sectors or forced to leave. If you don't have a lot of women around, you probably won't notice as many things that disproportionately affect women.
1.) The implication that a statistical outlier not being represented is something that would have been fixed by having more female engineers.
How much of an outlier is it for a woman to have a period exceeding 10 days in length? 1 in 15? 1 in 100? Is it not relevant? Would the 14/15 women who are not themselves these statistical outliers be roughly just as likely as men to lack this information? Presumably they would have a chance to be exposed to it by family/friends/relationships, but isn't that the same for the men? This sounds like either a problem with the FitBit team having not done proper research, or this being such a statistical outlier that it's an understandable mistake. Do the programmers on a diabetes bloodsugar reader need to themselves have diabetes, or is it not reasonable to suggest that they should instead be as well informed as needed to build the product?
2.) The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do with anything other than...the lack of female engineers.
3.) The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every application for the general public. If there was a nutritional application that didn't account for Celiac's disease, or a running app that didn't properly accommodate somebody's asthma, I'm not so sure that the right idea is to determine that this app needs to cover all such cases. There are market forces at work here, if there is a need for it, i.e. asthmatic runners who are unsatisfied with XYZ apps, then there is an opportunity. If you have longer-than-10 day periods, and FitBit doesn't change, you have a market opportunity. If it doesn't do well...there wasn't enough of a market. Or I guess we can just demand that all apps are built by diabetic asthmatic women to cover our bases.
Well, how long is the longest period that your female family members have had? Is this a thing you discuss with them?
> The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do with anything other than...the lack of female engineers.
You're bothered by the implication that thing have consequences?
> The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every application for the general public.
You mean the fact that period trackers need to be able to track periods?
So why didn't women build voice-recognition software? Developing software is not a regulated activity.
It's simple to complain from the sidelines [edit: or push down-vote buttons].
[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320758.php
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17113096/fitbit-watch-per...
I think you have more to get over than the author.
I've "known" a great many women but had no idea a period could last a month. Even if it was built entirely by virgin men who really are clueless there is no reason for the tone in the article. If I don't know something, just tell me. Don't write a passive aggressive piece because I don't know about that period you had 2016.
So the glass is almost empty. I get it.
If we set the bar higher than a minimum of 40% then we are quickly going into single digit percent of the population. There is very few professions with an exact 50/50 ratio.
Thank you for bringing attention to this very important point. From the tweet:
"FWIW this feature was led by women (product manager, head of product, engineering manager). I am not defending the design & I understand that it fails to meet your expectations. Fitbit isn't that big and the people there care a lot about helping people."
A later reply by a current employee: "Also, the algorithm development was led by a woman."
This is just another software flaw, not a demonstration of rampant sexism. I'd ask commenters here (in general, not replying to the parent comment) to curb their outrage. And if things like this really bother you, apply to one of our many open positions.
I take your comment (and the tweet I linked) as being correct about my assumption.
As a non-American (I am European) I am always amazed about how easily things like that are attributed to gender (non) inclusion in the USA. On the other hand, as a male I have to always wonder if I find these kind of reactions over the top not because I am not American but because of my gender.
More generally, there is a lot of sexism, at least in the U.S., which makes people more inclined to see it everywhere...it's a natural human bias.