Product design 

产品设计

Debugging gender bias

摒弃性别偏见

Silicon Valley is bad at making products that suit women.That is a missed opportunity.

硅谷拙于制造适合女性的产品,实乃错失良机。

Tailors worked out long ago that men and women have different shapes. Yet this message has failed to penetrate many other areas of design. Car seatbelts, for example, which date back to the 1880s, are often still configured for men, who tend to sit farther back than women when driving. Most protective gear used by workers is designed for men’s bodies. And today the most forward-looking place on Earth—Silicon Valley—is still embedding old-school bias into new products.

很久之前裁缝师傅就已学会量体裁衣，但这一经验没有传递到其他众多的设计领域中。例如，可以追溯到19世纪80年代的汽车安全带，仍常常仅为男性设计（男享），而男性在开车时往往比女性坐得更靠后。大部分工人的防护服也是根据男性体型设计的。即便是当今世界最具前瞻性之地（硅谷）在新产品设计中依然墨守成规（带有偏见）。

注：

1.Perspectives on gender and product design

https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01099496/file/paper133.pdf

2.Gender intelligent design: what brands, product designers and customer services need to know | Kantar

http://www.tnsglobal.com/intelligence-applied/gender-intelligent-design-what-brands-product-designers-customer-services-need-to-know

3.男治男享与同治同享

男治：由男性设计，男享：为男性设计。

同治同享：根据两性各自特点设计、包容两性差异。

4.沃尔沃一个鲜为人知的特殊群体——假人家族。

沃尔沃汽车很早以前就拥有一个远大的目标，那就是迈向“零伤亡”。与大多数厂家采用男性假人参与碰撞测试不同，沃尔沃汽车早在1995年开始采用女性假人进行碰撞试验。因为研究发现，老人、女性和儿童由于骨骼和生理结构的原因，在碰撞中更容易受到伤害。而2000年，沃尔沃进一步研发出了孕妇假人。至今，这位成本达到百万身价的“妈妈”，每年参加的碰撞测试要超过一百次。包含孕妇假人在内，沃尔沃开发了整个“假人家族”。这个家族“上有老下有小”，甚至还有“襁褓中的婴儿”。沃尔沃尽可能将各类人群的假人纳入到模拟碰撞测试之中，期望覆盖到更广大的人群样本，以采集到更充分的碰撞数据。”链接：

https://news.sina.com.cn/o/2019-08-07/doc-ihytcerm9000758.shtml

Consider virtual-reality headsets. Women are significantly more likely than men to feel sick when using them, perhaps because 90% of women have pupils that are closer together than the typical headset’s default setting. This is not an isolated example. Most smartphones are too big to fit comfortably into the average woman’s hand, as are many video-game controllers.

虚拟现实头盔便是一例。也许是因为90%的女性瞳孔间距都比头戴设备默认设置更近，女性使用时，明显比男性更容易感到不适。这绝非个例。对一般的女性而言，多数智能手机都太大而不易掌握，视频游戏手柄也是如此。

注：

1.女性的瞳孔大于男性瞳孔-ScienceDaily

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120426104953.htm

2.https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2019/11/23/virtual-reality-continues-to-make-people-sick

An obvious part of the explanation for Silicon Valley’s design problem is that men control most of its companies—male-run firms receive 82% of venture-capital (VC) funding—and entrepreneurs often build products to solve problems or address needs that affect them personally. Male bosses and entrepreneurs may be unaware of the problems women face. They may not flag up obvious areas of concern, or ask the right questions when doing their research (famously, Apple did not originally include menstrual-cycle tracking in its smartwatch, or in the iPhone’s Health app).

硅谷的设计忽视女性，一个显而易见的原因是硅谷的公司多由男性主导，男性经营的企业获得了82%的风险投资资金，企业家们生产产品时经常是为了解决自身面临的问题或是满足自己的需要。男性老板和企业家未必能意识到女性面临的问题。他们做调研时也许没能涉及（对女性而言）明显应关注的领域，或者提不出恰当的问题（众所周知，苹果最初没有在其智能手表或iPhone的健康应用程序中提供月经周期跟踪功能）。

Once an idea gets the green light it will then be handled by product-design and engineering teams, three-quarters of whose members are men. These teams often use data to make decisions, but lumping all users together means they may fail to spot trends based on sex differences. Reliance on historical data, and the sparsity of data on underrepresented groups, can also create bias in algorithms. Amazon binned a hiring algorithm that was persistently sexist, and Apple is being investigated over its new credit card, which offers women lower credit limits.

创意一旦被通过，产品设计部门以及工程师团队(其中四分之三是男性）就负责接下来的工作，其中男性占据四分之三。这些团队经常根据数据来做决策，但把所有用户放在一起意味着他们可能会忽视性别差异造成的趋势。依赖历史数据和不具代表性群体的零星数据也同样会造成算法偏见。亚马逊弃用了长期存在性别歧视的招聘算法，苹果则因其新信用卡为女性提供的信用额度较(男性）低，目前正面临调查。

注：

AI 和机器学习中暗含的算法偏见

https://linux.cn/article-9543-1.html

Next comes testing. Naturally, designers test prototypes on their intended customers, but they may not get feedback from a broad enough group of people. There is also the risk of confirmation bias—designers may listen to what they want to hear, and discount negative reactions from some groups of users.

随后产品设计进入测试阶段。当然，设计师会在他们的目标客户上测试原型，但是他们可能不会从足够多的人那里获得反馈。也存在确认偏颇的风险：设计师可能会听他们想听的，而忽视一些用户群体的负面反应。

注：

confirmation bias ：Confirmation bias, the tendency to process information by looking for, or interpreting, information that is consistent with one’s existing beliefs. This biased approach to decision making is largely unintentional and often results in ignoring inconsistent information. Existing beliefs can include one’s expectations in a given situation and predictions about a particular outcome. People are especially likely to process information to support their own beliefs when the issue is highly important or self-relevant.

https://www.britannica.com/science/confirmation-bias

Tech’s design bias needs fixing for ethical, safety and business reasons. The ethical imperative is obvious: it is wrong that women have to make do with a “one-size-fits-men” world, as Caroline Criado Perez, a writer, puts it. As for safety, regulators can tackle that by clamping down on things that are dangerous to women—including seatbelts—because they are not designed properly.

技术设计中存在的偏见需要从道德、安全、以及商业层面加以修正。伦理道德层面的重要性显而易见：让女性必须去适应“男士均码”的世界是错误的，这在作家卡洛琳·克里亚多·佩雷斯（Caroline Criado Perez）笔下得到了阐述。至于安全层面，监管者可以取缔包括安全带在内由于设计不合理而对女性造成危险的产品以解决此事。

注：

1.科技 | 身为女性,感觉自己在生活中被忽视?这个锅甩给科技来背!

http://www.sohu.com/a/301217948_99899108

2. In 'Invisible Women,' Caroline Criado Perez Argues That "One-Size-Fits-All" Usually Means "One-Size-Fits-Men"

https://www.bustle.com/p/in-invisible-women-caroline-criado-perez-argues-that-one-size-fits-all-usually-means-one-size-fits-men-16822238

But there is also a powerful business case for avoiding design bias, because huge opportunities are being missed. Women are 50% of the population, and make 70-80% of the world’s consumer-spending decisions. That means they control the deployment of more than $40trn a year.

但是，避免设计偏见也有强大的商业理由，因为商家们正错失巨大良机。占全球人口半数的女性是70%-80%消费性开支的决策者。这意味着她们每年可以支配超过40万亿美元的资金。

Change may be coming. The first voice-recognition systems struggled to understand female voices, but most now manage just fine. “Femtech” startups, which focus on women’s health and well-being, may raise $1bn by the end of this year. VC funds and tech firms are recruiting more women. Ensuring that products are designed for everyone would lead to happier and safer customers. For the companies that get it right, that means higher profits. What is holding them back?

变革或许正在来临。第一批声音识别系统很难处理女性声音，但现在大多不成问题。专注于女性健康的“Femtech（女性科技）”初创公司们今年年底前可能会筹得10亿美元。 风险投资企业和科技公司正在招募更多的女性职员。保证产品的设计适合每一个人将会让顾客感到更加快乐和安全，做到这一点的公司就能获得更高的利润。没有什么东西可以阻止这一改变。

注：

1.语音识别技术也存在性别歧视

https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/news/145962

2.Femtech崛起，女性健康创业者如何利用智能化硬件讲好“数据的故事”？

http://m.biodiscover.com/news/research/733665.html 

3. Femtech崛起，女性健康创业者如何利用智能化硬件讲好“数据的故事”？

http://www.biodiscover.com/news/u/733665.html

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