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

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Car seatbelts, protective gear and even virtual-reality headsets are often still configured for men

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.

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.

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.

 

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