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JASON KLEIN: Hello, Cloud Next family.
I am incredibly excited to be here today.
My name is Jason Klein, and I lead a team at Google
called Human Truths.
We are a team of analysts and innovators,
and our goal is to help understand the human insight
that sits behind Google data.
We all have the opportunity to make others feel seen.
We just need the data to give us the jumping-off point.
Why don't people feel seen?
We all have different definitions of DEI,
but at the end of the day, 44% of people
globally say that they don't feel seen.
This is even true in a market like France.
France on the surface has low religious diversity,
low language diversity, low racial diversity.
Yet, 50% of people in France don't
feel seen, so there has to be some aspects of identity
that we're not seeing, something that we
need to understand if we're really
going to have a full definition of diversity, equity,
and inclusion.
How can we make people feel seen?
Well, first, we need to be open to understanding who they are
and how they identify themselves.
You see myself and some of my colleagues on the screen here.
Personally, I happen to be gay, married without kids,
and a dog lover.
All things I would openly tell anyone who asked.
You have some similar descriptors
for my colleagues on the screen, and we
could pick one thing from each of the columns
and just call it a day.
But if we really want to have true DEI discussions,
we need to understand what's most important to people.
So what if you knew that we searched best place to live
for married without kids, expats, introverts,
young professionals?
Maybe there's an aspect of DEI that has surfaced itself
that is different than what you would
have thought based on the three descriptors
I showed you before.
We've opened a door to something that's important to each of us,
and we want you to open that door to the people that
are important to you.
That is the only way that we're creating real connections
and helping people say, yes, you feel seen.
So that's why we focused on this and call this the power of for.
For is truly the most powerful keyword at your fingertips.
When someone is qualifying their search as blank for blank,
they're saying, "I assume the default search results doesn't
apply to me, and I need to qualify my search in this way
to get the answers that I'm seeking."
So my favorite example of this, of course,
is dating, because I don't think anyone would just randomly put
dating into a Google Search bar.
You probably want to qualify the type of person
that you want to meet.
So all of a sudden, within dating,
we start to see aspects of identity
that you may have thought of, like age, but also,
ones that you may not have thought of, like gamers,
disabled, professionals.
These are aspects of identity that
are so important that people are qualifying
their searches in this way.
And so that's what my team has done.
We've been looking at this one single word
and its language equivalents all across the globe,
20 different markets, 17 different languages.
And by looking at this across all different types
of categories, whether it be beauty, whether it be jobs,
whether it be education, whether it be dating, all of these
are ways that we can start to identify
the aspects of identity that maybe were not clear to us
before.
And I want to share three of those identities
today, check all that apply, hair-raising specificity,
and family matters.
So what do I mean when I say check all that apply?
Well, consider this.
In 2010, there were 9 million people on the US Census
who identified as more than one race.
In 2020, that number became 34 million people.
That's a 276% increase.
Similarly, 50%, one out of two, Gen Z
agrees that traditional gender roles are outdated,
and 21 million Germans have migrated from another country.
Half of those people are speaking a language
other than German at home.
This is what we mean by check all that apply.
It's that there's more than one thing.
That combination is critically important to the searcher,
and that is why people are searching in this way.
We see this in Google data, as well,
and I don't think this is any more prevalent than the use
of terminology like "brown."
Consider the fact that there's two and a half times more
global search volume "for brown skin" than there
is "for my skin."
This word "brown" is incredibly important to searchers.
We can look at someone like Brandon,
who is our example here, and we could
try to guess how he wants to be bucketed.
But he's raising his hand and saying,
you don't understand all the aspects of myself,
but I self-identify as brown.
And I want you to understand that.
Now, you may be asking, why is Jason,
someone who presents as white, talking about brown skin?
And that's a completely valid point.
And so I want to make sure that we're also
elevating those that have the best understanding of what
it means to be brown either in the US or any country
across the globe.
This is Professor Maira.
She's a professor of Asian-American Studies at UC
Davis, and she talks about the fact
that we need to be aware of our own unconscious biases
when we think about a classification like brown.
There may be people that phenotypically
read as white to the outside world,
but they come from brown countries.
And similarly, a descriptor of brown
may be used as an identifier who is
someone who is Middle Eastern, Latina, Filipina.
There are aspects of this descriptor
that are broader than all of us might even realize.
And so we should look to people like Professor Maira
to guide us through how to ensure
that we are inclusive of those that don't fit neatly
into check boxes.
So I really want to encourage all of you
to think about these types of check all that apply.
The same thing goes for gender.
What you're looking at here is Google Trends, and the search
volume that exists, and the interest
that exists in people searching for nonbinary
or for gender-neutral language.
Language is so fascinating in that it is gendered itself.
If you look at many of the romance languages,
words are either masculine or feminine.
One of the breakout searches of the last year
is, what is a gender-neutral term for aunt or uncle?
It's important to understand that people are searching
this way and that it is not only in, quote unquote,
"progressive Western markets."
All across the globe, people are trying
to understand what it means, how to identify, how to include,
and we can do this through nonbinary and gender-neutral
language, but only if we allow ourselves to open ourselves up
to things that we may not understand.
So with any of these examples, I encourage you,
make sure you're asking yourself,
how am I ensuring that a "check all that apply"
mindset is incorporated into my enterprise solutions?
I want to shift to talk about hair,
and that's not just because I have a very good hair day
today.
I want to talk about hair because it's
more than just hair.
Consider this, 80% of Black women in the US
feel that they've had to change their hair to fit
into a corporate setting.
8 million people in the UK are suffering
from some form of alopecia, and only 4% of Latinx women
agree that they're comfortable leaving the house without hair
products.
OK, so you can say this is important to some people.
But is it important to all people?
And the answer is yes.
The reason why hair is important for not just hair brands
to understand is because it means something more than hair.
It means care.
It means race.
It means punishment.
It means resistance.
It means culture.
Hair carries our DNA, and so we bring it with us, literally,
everywhere we go.
So why in Google data are people putting
more and more specificity behind their hair searches?
There's 40% more adjectives that are
used to describe people's hair versus beauty overall.
When we see searching like this, continuous searching, trying
to find that right solution over and over and over again,
this is a signal that something is
incredibly important to them.
There's raw emotion that's associated with this.
If you can't find the answers you're looking for
and something has as much emotion as hair does,
you can imagine what that person on the other end of the search
bar is feeling.
Consider this example from Hannah in the UK
who talks about thinning, postpartum, graying hair.
All of these are aspects of her hair journey, which is
affecting her emotional state.
It's affecting how she views herself in the world,
and there's an opportunity for someone, anyone, everyone
to recognize this and be there as part of her
and all of our hair journeys.
So if hair specificity exists, we all
need to think about how we're helping others either celebrate
or rebel against their cultural norms.
There is a celebration or rebellion
that exists within each of us, within every market,
every single person.
You have two examples of women here from Brazil,
and by the way, this is not something
that is only relevant to women.
Hair impacts everyone.
Think about Sikh coverings, for instance,
the idea of covering your hair and what
that means within that culture for Sikh men.
But if you allow people to either celebrate
or rebel against their hair norms,
you are recognizing that hair matters.
And so I encourage you to think about,
how does this celebration or rebellion of hair norms
integrate into the enterprise solutions
that you're trying to implement?
It may sound far fetched, but I guarantee you,
there is a connection between people's connection
to hair and the solution that you are ultimately trying
to put out into the world.
I want to end today with a description and a discussion
of family, and that's what we call family matters.
It's probably not a surprise to many people
here that we've become closer to our families
during the pandemic.
61% of Britons realized how important family
was during the pandemic, but we have
to make sure that we're not putting
our own definitions of family into that type of stat.
21% of South Koreans live alone, and 55%, so more than half,
of Hindu households are extended family households.
So when someone goes home after work
and they're spending time with their family,
who is that family?
That's something that we see in Google data as well.
We see an incredible growth of for family searches.
So if for family searches are more important
and we're seeing searches like "best SUV for family of six,"
are we putting our own unconscious biases
into what makes up a family of six?
Is it two parents and four children?
Is it one parent and five children?
Is it one parent, two grandparents, three children?
Is it no children?
There are so many different definitions of families
as we have evolved and grown, especially
in the last few years.
So we need to be thinking about what drives people's households
and how they define family for themselves.
Only 1/3, 33%, of global families
are two-parent households, and this is often differing,
depending on household religion and traditions.
So understanding cultural differences,
understanding why someone else might define their family
in a different way is important to ensure that we are not
putting our own biases into the descriptions of families
that people are raising their hands and saying,
hey, pay attention to my family.
I'll summarize this by saying that the evolving definition
of families should be and can be incorporated
into your enterprise solutions, and these
are things that we want to make sure we can
do to make progress together.
We don't have all the answers.
I promise you, no one does, but we can make progress together.
We can think about our company operations.
How are we using these insights to assess
whether our operational policies reflect
employee self-identifications?
We can, of course, use this for product development.
Are we thinking about how the products
we're building actually reflect the way people are
raising their hands and saying they want to be identified?
And finally, can we--
I'll answer the question for you.
We can challenge our unconscious biases.
We can challenge our unconscious biases
by just continuously asking ourself,
is there an opportunity for more people to feel seen?
Thank you so much for joining me today.
It's been an honor to present here to Cloud Next.
I am so proud of what you and I and all of us
can do together with this information.
Thank you.
Have a wonderful day.
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