Since this is a talk on Gender, uh, this talk will include bits and pieces of, uh, sexual
harassment, violence and abuse.
So, please give yourself the space to think deeply about some of these issues.
All the data that we're representing here has been vigorously redacted by a privacy
and anonymization team and uh, we are only using pseudonyms here and public images.
And, like all previous speakers, I'm only representing the very tip of the iceberg here.
This is nearly eight months of research.
So, India is a country with 48 percent female population, that's nearly half the population.
29 percent of the Internet users are female.
So, that means, for every female data points, there's 2.4 male data points.
And so, when we tend to look at, um data, as an aggregate, then we are particularly
looking at the male usage behavior.
And the aggregate doesn't represent people at the margins.
So, if we don't pay attention to subgroups, then we continue to marginalize them.
So, our call to action to you is to listen.
Listen to these subgroups people at the margins but we've been working on this project to
make it easier to give you a bit of a head start.
So, we spoke to people who identified as females in six countries: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh,
Nigeria and currently doing research in Brazil and Mexico.
And spoke to over 200, uh, participants.
We used a mixed-methods approach of qualitative research of, uh, interviews, observations
and focus groups and quantitative research of logs analysis and non-scaled surveys.
And we partnered with the local universities and the names that you saw earlier.
And we sampled across income levels, across sexual orientations, religion, geo locations
and we worked with the recruitment agencies but also with non-profits.
And we wanted to understand the broader ecosystem of women's access to technology, so we also
included men in our research, in order to understand how they view women's access to
forms and, um, Internet.
So, this includes brothers, husbands, partners, fathers.
So, we packaged all of our research into this one slide.
Access, Content in Community, Privacy and Safety.
Let's start with Access.
We visited a village in [inaudible] which is a state in the north of India, with a population
higher than that of Nigeria.
And when we spoke to the men in the village, they talked about how they viewed women's
access to technology, often associating it with eloping, bad things like promiscuity,
uh, that arise as a result of access.
So, even when women did have access, their husbands and fathers would regularly check
on their phones, just to make sure that they were safe.
So, we should note that many men were genuinely trying to protect their vulnerable family
members but did it in a way that was reinforcing patriarchy.
As this gentlemen notes, it's no problem if women get phones, as long as they're not doing
bad things.
Mobiles can spoil women.
So, regularly you hear about news incidents of phones being banned only for women.
And here's a female perspective on the same issue.
We spoke to Chithra, who learned how to do makeup and hairstyles from looking at online
videos and she set up a mini beauty parlor micro business in the village, to which the
village women come to her for birthdays and marriages.
And she said: When women talk about getting to access, uh, about seeing the recipe or
a [inaudible] or a henna design, or something which is very feminine and useful in the eyes
of her man, then they let us use the phone.
So, in other words, uh, she is um, working her access constraints by playing to the [inaudible]
feminine and productive content as viewed by her society.
But of course, she's probably isn't just looking at henna designs and recipes.
She's doing a whole lot more.
Even when we women do get access to technology, there are other component, factors that influence
how they use it.
Time is something that we assume people have when they use products.
But the onus on housework and childcare, it often falls on women, even among working women.
So, in the survey of over 30 countries, women in India spend five hours per day doing housework.
And this includes child care, washing, cooking.
Men spend 20 minutes.
So, in this survey, women did the most amount of house-work in the 30 countries and men
did the least amount of housework in that survey.
So, do our designs provide a-, are perceived as female friendly, not just in the eyes of
women but obviously, men in our research, as well, in our design approaches.
Do our designs provide a meaningful experience in a short amount of time?
A number of [inaudible] is how they really have like 15 minutes of free time per day.
Can we help them meaningfully engage with signal and separate noise.
So, assuming they can get to the experience, what lies ahead?
Is the content relevant to them?
So, some-, a young mother in Bangladesh says, uh, talks about her pregnancy and she says:
I had so much anxiety.
What will the changes in my body be?
What are the pains?
I could not ask these questions to anyone.
And she had a mother and her mother-in-law.
Women often have a need for information on sensitive topics.
This includes the domain on health, but also other domains like finance and well-being,
which are highly stigmatized and considered a woman's knowledge, and that is something
that she should just have, and hence, taboo to discuss.
So, information platforms can play a crucial role here in opening a conversation, uh, for
these stigmatized topics.
But people need community as much as they need information.
They're both fundamental needs and this is especially true for women that are going against
the grain, breaking norms, those coming from smaller towns.
So, [inaudible � name] a student in India who talks about relatable role models in her
community.
She says: When I search online, I can't show my normal, [inaudible] and say: I want to
be like her.
My mom needs to see someone who looks like me, talks my language but is from my community.
But really, it's up to the those women in computer science.
So, this is further to Ricken's point on how, uh, people like to see other from their community,
when getting inspired.
And now this-, this relatable role model is playing a role not just for herself now, but
also for her family members, in helping her break the norm of young women, um, being over
qualified.
So, can people easily discover taboo topics?
Your platforms are just use cases like health, education and finances.
And do we offer the ability to not only discover community and relatable role models, but actually
become one.
So, for the women on our technologies, do we understand their privacy needs?
And provide the right controls?
When we talk about privacy, we want you to open up your minds about a slightly different
version of what privacy is.
In the countries where we've done research, privacy, for the most part, is less about
data collection by organizations and governments.
That does exist for a certain segment, but predominantly, for women and non-violent people,
it is about what other people can see and the potential reputation and physical damage
that can arise as a result.
And this privacy is important for women in both physical and online worlds.
So, we wanna illustrate both.
Here's a vignette of the physical world.
Women tend to share their forms or have mediator access because of simply lower access to technology.
I shared a garments worker in Dhaka who recently purchased a SmartPhone.
Told us how her husband regularly checks her phone, and her sister-in-law's kids borrow
her phone.
We found, consistently, that the mother's food is a shared device at home.
And because Isha cannot refuse to give the phone to someone, she has other strategies
to maintain her privacy.
So, she has an App lock, uh, so the kids can borrow the phone.
But her social media messages and her photos are hidden by password.
Women come under great social scrutiny and shaming for their actions.
So, it's even more important that our privacy controls work for them.
Even when the app lock is enabled by women, the very presence of the app lock application
on their phone, leads to questions like: What do you have to hide from me?
So, we have an opportunity to address this.
Do our technologies allow people to easily remove traces?
Instead of heavy-handed controls like locks and profiles, which don't necessarily work
in this fluid environment of social sharing, can we provide micro controls that offer flexibility
and freedom to people, as they use in different situations?
And micro privacy states are always useful, like incognito, but we discovered in our research
that they're very limited to only the tech-savvy people.
So, how can we help everyone discover them?
Moving on to online information privacy.
This is a beautiful quote from uh, a lady in Dhaka: Information is uncontrollable.
Once you share anything, you can not take it back.
So, it should be of no surprise that all of our participants carefully guard and carry
their personally identifying information online.
Uh, women may hesitate to engage online.
This may mean posting comments, creating content, uh, creating a full-fledged profile.
Because of stalking, hate and the social judgment that comes with it.
So, just to reinforce this further, consider a recent news story that broke out a few months
ago, of how mobile phone numbers were copied by shopkeepers in the state that we talked
about with the British and sold as bulk packages.
And so people can buy these packages and contact women and stalk them.
So, the connection that many women made in our studies � if you have my phone number,
then you'll get access to my, uh, contents on the phone and you can cause some form of
reputation damage of my identity.
Women hesitate to disclose phone numbers, full names, declare their gender, location
which are all right vectors of abuse.
And more and more technologies are increasingly relying on phone numbers and, uh, personally
identifying information which is problematic for women and, uh, non-[inaudible] communities.
There are useful things that we can do here, as technology researchers and designers.
Start by asking: If we really need that person's identifying information, even if it is optional
� uh, do we offer safe alternatives to profile pictures and names, such as - with other cards
or pseudonyms or nicknames?
And do we allow users to easily find and manage their privacy settings, instead of them having
to hack our designs?
So, lastly � safety.
Safety is often viewed, as an edge [?] case.
Harassment and abuse are common incidents that happen.
Even when we spoke to a broad spectrum of women, safety came up in nearly every interview.
So, Safety here isn't just about online abuse and the social shaming.
It's an ever-present need in the real world.
One of our participants told us how when she printed bus tickets, there was a helpline
women's helpline number that was, uh, printed along with it.
And it automatically assigned women to sit next to each other.
So, even although she was probably not going to call that helpline, the very presence of
it has gained her trust.
One-touch panic buttons weren't used by any of our participants in our research.
But technology is used today in feeling safe in various physical situations.
Directions on maps are used to double-check when traveling in public transport.
The camera is used to shoot pictures of the number plate which are used for accountability.
Often fake phone calls are made to feel safe in situations, just to show that someone else
is out there and can look out for me.
But many women don't know about these features or when to use them in various physical situations.
How can we assure that safety features lead to a meaningful follow up?
So, instead of her: Thank you for your feedback can we offer something that will actually
enable our users to come back to our technologies?
Inclusive research is just good research.
Start by balancing your gender issues.
Start by creating safe spaces, uh, to talk to minorities, to understand their points
of view.
Analyze by aggregates, but also analyze by subgroups in order to understand how they
fit into the larger story or do not.
And growth is a good thing to measure in any initiative or trend, to make your product
more [inaudible].
Some of the simple metrics that you can use are: What percentage of your current users
are females?
What percentage of your market is female?
And what's the difference in engagement between the various genders?
So, again, our call to action to you is to listen.
Uh, listen to the subgroups, listen to the people at the margins.
Write to us if you'd like us to bring this, uh, this work to your organization.
We'd be more than happy to do so.
Thanks.