[bingbingbong]

Is the implication here that Apple had no women working on the Health app, Google Photos has no black team members (and if they did, they would have explicitly checked this case?), Snapchat has no asians, etc? Or that some magic ratio would have caught these issues?

There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.

[marbletiles]

Yes, that is absolutely the implication. These mistakes are so egregious they're almost instantly obvious to people who know to look. For instance, the Health app tracked seemingly everything under the sun, including blood-alcohol levels. The reaction from women when it shipped was instant: where's the period tracker?

If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.

But: Apple's diversity report from then [1] says they were 80% male in tech, so while the assumption might be serious, I don't think it's unreasonable.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2014/8/12/5949453/no-surprise-apple...

[bingbingbong]

Apple case is somewhat odd as it's a guilt by omission. I would bet large amounts of money on there being at least woman within the product chain on this (director, PM, TPM, designers). That is, I don't think there's as strong of a correlation between presence of an identity and attention to features/products they would be affected by. For example, I could see a PM reading articles like this [1] and deciding there's too much potential heat on a period app in the default offerings. FWIW I also think this should have been there, and Apple can position themselves nicely w.r.t privacy concerns.

Like, at its core, I agree with the statement that having women on the team would not decrease the probability that these sorts of mistakes don't happen. But its positive impact has to be non-deterministic (or else getting into some implications about <identity> as a group which I can't get behind).

[1] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2018/11/13/18079458/menstrual-...

[thu2111]

If there was a woman on that team it says even less good things about Apple that they shipped without it.

So you admit it's nothing to do with diversity, then, just an ambient assumption that the needs of women should automatically trump the needs of men and women combined?

The simplest explanation for Apple's decision is not that they're all raging sexists who need to be forced to hire more women by activists, but rather that when adding features to an app they are ranked by how useful they'd be to the entire userbase. Feature development is a zero sum game - adding that means not adding a different feature. Any feature exclusively for women will have half utility by that obvious metric and lose automatically to features useful for everyone. So the real question is why would anyone expect a general purpose health app to have a period tracker? Isn't that a pretty grotesque sense of entitlement by a small handful of women?

As for the others, come on. That's exactly what I mean by ridiculous arguments. Any photo app should have a black team member who is tasked to spend all day taking selfies and not, say, fixing bugs or adding features? If some company was dumb enough to actually do that, they'd just get criticised in other ways, because such black-testing jobs would be menial low wage jobs, not highly paid and respected software engineering positions. Some of those examples aren't even oversights, like Apple's straightforward prioritization decisions or the fact that Google Translate uses gendered language when translating languages that use genders pervasively. They're just stuff a small minority of activists have chosen to get faux-offended over. And the few that remain are clearly not caused by lack of diversity awareness given you chose to cite Google Home (I'll take your word for it on the stat), a product from one of the companies most visibly committed to filling the ranks with women. They even hired a black female AI ethics researcher, so obviously it's not lack of diversity that caused the training set problems.

In other words none of the examples you cite have anything to do with "diversity" and cannot, because as you admit, you have no idea what the demographics of those teams is. You're just assuming that they must be all made up of un-caring men who never think about others, which is exactly the sexist assumption underlying all identity politics that I highlighted!

[marbletiles]

Periods are relevant to a "small handful" of women? Have you discussed your thinking with any women?

Is it a "pretty grotesque" sense of entitlement at work when a man looks for a urinal in a public building? Or when a disabled person looks for the wheelchair ramp? These things have half utility at best by your "obvious metric".

Take this further: imagine architecture firms were staffed mostly (80%+) by women. They keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies), they don't provide urinals and so on.

Is it a wild assumption that having more men – or, god, "experts in catering to men (who might be men but also women)" - on their teams would help address these repeated own goals? Or do we need to spend years getting the data that shows us the real, mysterious, non-political underlying cause of this gender bias in buildings?

[cutemonster]

It seems to me that buildings and medicine and cars and gym equipment and everything, need to be usability tested on all groups of people: short, tall, men, women, black, white, thin, fat, old, young, wheelchair, blind, deaf.

But I don't think all those groups of people need to take part in the construction work.

It'd be nice with more diversity in tech. So please don't misunderstand. I just think that there are other better examples of how diversity is good.

(Usability testing: Testing early prototypes I suppose -- it's not that easy to redo, say, a car, once it's in production.)

> keep getting complaints because their doorways are only 5'11" high (ideal for 99% of women's bodies),

That thought makes me feel upset! (Although I'm not a human. But I am tall) Thanks for a good example

[thu2111]

I feel like you're deliberately mis-interpreting me. It's a small number of women who kick up a big fuss on Twitter about the choices of Apple's PM team.