On racism and sexism in branding, user interface, and tech

Race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender are complex topics. For years, the world has been trying to move past certain stereotypes and transcend prejudice. However, as technology and design advance, they uncover more deep-seated, more unconscious biases dwelling in the human mind.

Today, we’d like to explore a less technical topic. In this article, we’ll take a look at some unfortunate design, copy, and tech decisions made by massive international brands.

It’s safe to say that these decisions’ repercussions could have easily been mitigated if only these products were developed with diversity in mind.

Let’s dive right in.

A glimpse of the problem

In 2017, we saw what seems like one of the most unfortunate combinations of tech and racism. A machine learning (ML) risk assessment algorithm used by the US court was shown to be heavily biased against black prisoners.

“The program, Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions (Compas), was much more prone to mistakenly label black defendants as likely to reoffend — wrongly flagging them at almost twice the…