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There’s a new form of domestic abuse, and so-called “smart” home devices are the weapons.
And, yes, women are more likely to be affected by this perverse use of technology. Here’s how it works: An abuser can lock a victim into her own home using web-enabled locks, and monitor her every move via video security systems. An abuser can expose a victim to extreme heat or cold by remotely controlling a smart thermostat, or wake her up in the middle of the night by blasting music with a remote control.
Smart home abuse is just one way in which technology is disproportionately harmful to women. A few others: Machine learning algorithms can reinforce gender biases inherent in the datasets used to train them, so recruiting tools for tech workers can be biased against women. Crash dummies are based on male bodies, so car safety tests don’t account for female anatomy. Voice recognition software is more likely to understand a male voice. Mapping apps can provide the fastest route to any destination, though not the safest one. And tech gadgets at our service often have female voices, reinforcing gender power imbalances.
Tech’s dark side arises from who designs and builds it—and who’s excluded from the process. When diverse voices are shut out, so too are diverse ideas, perspectives, and values.
According to a 2019 report by Women in Communications and Technology, men in technology outnumber women by a ratio of four to one. Women who manage to break into the sector wield significantly less power. They earn less than their male counterparts and are less likely to be promoted to leadership positions. Little wonder they’re more likely to flee the industry.
The need to include diverse voices in the innovation process propelled Sarah Saska to found Feminuity, a consulting firm that helps tech companies become more diverse and inclusive. Though her firm’s name blends the words “feminism” and “ingenuity,” Saska wants to do more than just get more women hired at tech workplaces.
Feminuity’s version of feminism is decidedly intersectional. When clients come to Saska saying, “We need to hire more women,” the 30-something entrepreneur takes the conversation deeper. “The goal of 50 percent representation of women in any space is not only shortsighted but also wildly essentialist. You could end up hiring only white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, resourced women. It’s such a limited frame, and we’ll be no further ahead.”
Rather, an intersectional approach takes into account people’s overlapping identities and experiences. For example, black women, disabled women, gender non-conforming people, and women who care for children and elders may face specific obstacles to employment and promotion. Until a company removes those barriers, it will not achieve equity.
It’s an approach that’s been missing from tech workplaces, says Saska, who grew up in a feminist home and earned a PhD in gender studies and feminist research at Western University in London, Ont. While researching innovation theory for her degree, she began to realize a huge gap. “There wasn’t anything related to humanness, such as gender or race,” she says. “It was absent. It didn’t make sense to me. How could we not talk about the human side of things?”
Wanting to apply her understanding to the business world, Saska launched Feminuity in 2014, along with innovation expert Andrea Rowe (who has since left the company). A 2016 Studio Y fellowship at MaRS Discovery District helped Saska hone her entrepreneurship and leadership skills, build networks, and translate her academic knowledge into business practices.
Says Saska: “I got into this space because, right now, we’re at an inflection point. Some tech companies are larger than entire countries. Tech companies have power, and they’re outpacing our laws and policies and playing in new and grey spaces. Tech can exacerbate or make things better when it comes to equity.”
In Canada’s tech sector, she says the need for diversity and inclusion work is especially urgent. To her knowledge, the massively successful e-commerce platform Shopify is the only tech company with a senior level diversity leader and a team, while the US has many more companies investing in this area. “Canadian tech talks a lot about how ‘diversity is our strength,’ and I find that frustrating,” says Saska. “Diversity is not a given. It’s something that we must design for deliberately and intentionally. There’s a lot that needs to happen before we can say diversity is really our strength.”
Now in its fifth year, Feminuity employs between 10 and 20 people at any given time, contracting specialists as needed to work primarily with small and medium-sized companies that may not have the resources to hire a full-time employee dedicated to diversity and inclusion, yet know they need help.
The process starts when Feminuity conducts a holistic survey of the business, collecting quantitative and qualitative data about processes, physical space, products, and policies.
The quantitative data is decidedly intersectional, with survey questions designed to create a layered picture of how women with multiple identities experience the workplace, helping leaders understand, say, the challenges of a racialized single mother with child care issues.
To gather qualitative information, Anisha Phillips, an associate consultant at Feminuity, conducts video interviews with employees who opt in. Phillips says participants sometimes assume they’ll be asked if they’ve experienced discrimination. Rather, open-ended questions prompt them to describe what they like and don’t like about their workplaces.
“Inclusion has many different aspects,” explains Phillips, adding it doesn’t always look the way people expect it to. In training workshops, the Feminuity team refers to an article that describes 34 diversity characteristics, including gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, language, physical ability, cognitive ability, mental health, social roles within the home, and political beliefs, to name just a few.
After Saska’s team gathers data and analyzes it through an intersectional lens, they co-design strategies with clients, help build an internal steering committee, provide resources and training, and prepare the company to implement the plan, which typically takes six months to a year, though some engage in the process for several years.
Feminuity’s approach may touch on any aspect of business, not just hiring and human resource policies. It could mean diversifying a company’s supply chain to include Indigenous contractors, for example, or improving how work spaces function for people with disabilities, or closing salary gaps that may exist between a company’s most junior and senior employees.
In some cases, Saska may act as a part-time chief diversity officer, a more affordable way to build inclusion into leadership for companies that don’t have the resources to hire a full-time employee for the role. But her ultimate goal is to build internal capacity to embed diversity and inclusion practices in a company’s day-to-day culture and operations.
The key to embedding equity lies in helping leaders see the business through a lens of “futurism,” which, to Saska, means being thoughtful about the long-term impacts of a product or service for everyone—not just the dominant group.
“Is there a chance it could exacerbate inequities that already exist?” she asks. “If your goal is shortsighted, if you just want to get wealthy, there’s always a shadow side. You’re going to benefit some people—those who have dominant identities, those with power—and you’re going to leave others behind.”
Saska sees more tech startups and scaleups baking social justice into their way of doing business from the very beginning. It doesn’t take a lot of resources, she says, but does take a sense of intention. Small startups on small budgets can access Feminuity’s open-source resources—offered free on its website—to create inclusive job descriptions, interview practices, benefits packages, organizational structures, sexual harassment policies, and compensation packages.
Embracing diversity can avoid expensive and complex problems down the road. Saska cites Uber as an example of how failing to consider the needs of women can create a flawed business model, as the money-losing company is plagued by accusations that the car-sharing app makes users vulnerable to sexual assault by contract drivers.
As for Feminuity’s internal hiring process, Phillips described it as “a conversation” rather than about credentials or degrees. She says Saska wanted to know, what her research was about, what types of issues were of interest to her. “It was about getting to know me as a person,” she says.
Saska describes the company culture as being in a continual process of growth. The team is moving to a new space in Toronto and hiring new team members, some of whom will work remotely. That has spurred her to study inclusive practices for remote teams, which she’ll test on her own group.
“We are trying to figure out, embody, and actualize the work we do with our clients,” says Saska. The goal is to distill social justice concepts into habits of thought for groups who create technologies, and that’s an ongoing project.
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Along with crowdfunding, biometric cash assistance, cryptocurrencies, and mobile wallets, another growing digitally enabled source of capital is women-focused capital funds (WFCFs). These funds target women-owned, women-led enterprises, femme and non-binary entrepreneurs, and aim to level the access-to-capital playing field.
That’s the good news. However, a newly released study in Small Business Economics on WFCFs suggests feminist investors, policymakers, and entrepreneurs need to be asking more questions before resting their feminist boots. Professors Barbara Orser of Telfer School of Management at University of Ottawa, Susan Coleman of Hartford University, and doctoral student Yanhong Li recently examined the market positioning of 27 funds in the US and Canada. “We were curious to learn if women-centric investment pools, such as WFCFs, aim to alter exchange processes to support justice and gender equality. At the end of the day, we found that the majority of funds focus on fixing women. Few seek to address structural or institutional impediments,” said Orser. “The bottom line is that among the funds that we examined, only a minority sought to counter structural barriers associated with women entrepreneurs’ access to capital. Most were positioned to facilitate individual wealth creation.”
The study found that this kind of pinkwashing is most likely when funds are created as add-ons to mainstream programs and services, rather than as a central element of the organization’s mission of supporting women and non-binary femmes. In addition, few of the funds displayed third-party assessment or an audit of the fund. Opaque accountability and an absence of independent evaluations were common. This means we cannot always be sure that the funds set to advance women-owned and led ventures actually get to them.
According to the researchers, most WFCFs fall short of supporting a feminist agenda to address institutional and market barriers. The team concludes that, depending on the investment, some WFCFs challenge while some simply perpetuate bias and reinforce structural constraints that impede women entrepreneurs by not actually changing investment due diligence and approval orthodoxies.
The study offers feminist investors insights to consider before assuming that all funds serve an inclusive economic agenda. This study also alerts LiisBeth readers that there are an increasing number of differentiated WFCFs, so it is wise to shop around—and keep your feminist boots walking.
To download the study (for free), click here.
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CG Chen, founder of Ample Labs (Photo: David Dines)
Working as a user experience designer at a tech company, CG Chen had done co-design workshops before, but this one was different. Around a dozen young people crowded into a small room at Sherbourne Health Centre in downtown Toronto, to share their experiences with homelessness. They appeared to be between 16 and 30, identified as LGBTQ2IA, and participated in the health centre’s Supporting Our Youth (SOY) program that promotes wellness for at-risk youth. That day, they didn’t come seeking support, but to lend a hand—and to share their experiences so that Chen’s non-profit startup, Ample Labs, could improve an app to access services for the homeless.
Creating a trusting atmosphere for the youth living on the street took conscious effort. Chen met with SOY staff multiple times in advance to ensure the workshop was a safe space, anti-racist, and anti-oppressive. Then Chen got creative, handing out writing and craft supplies to those gathered around a large table, so they could express themselves authentically and on their terms.
They came from different backgrounds—some had lived in Canada for years, others had recently arrived as refugees—but they all shared a key concern when looking for a place to spend the night: safety. The participants told horror stories of ending up in shelters that weren’t LGBTQ2A friendly—and experiencing violence and trauma as a result.
During this co-design session and many others, Chen and her team of volunteers at Amble Labs also discovered that many initially facing homelessness turned to Google for help as they were often too ashamed to seek out in-person resources. But the Google results that came up were not very helpful. That was one of the main frustrations people in the sessions expressed—service agencies don’t actually involve or listen to the concerns of individuals experiencing homelessness.
Says Chen of Ample Labs’ venture to change that: “We bring the people that we build this product for into our process as much as possible so they’re part of building the solution with us.”
The result? Chen and her team learned that Toronto’s homeless population has high concentrations of people identifying as refugees, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of colour), and/or LGBTQI2A (particularly youth). So Ample Labs decided to focus on creating solutions for individuals between the ages of 16 and 35 who are at risk of or experiencing homelessness and come from diverse identities and situations. One of their first creations was ChalmersBot, a free web-based chat-bot that provides location-based information. You enter what you need—a warm meal, clothing, shelter—and ChalmersBot suggests a nearby resource. After what they learned at the SOY workshop, Chen and her team added a filter to ChalmersBot to identify resources that are LGBTQI2A friendly.
Chen describes working intentionally and directly in a co-design fashion with the homeless community as a feminist approach. The goal is to understand what the homeless need and empower them to contribute to solutions, so services created are actually used by the community. “It’s easy to identify as a feminist organization because with the app and in everything we do, we are trying to promote equality in this community that often times struggles with inequality.”
Could a Sandwich Start a Revolution?
Chen, now 27, can trace the start of her journey to a sandwich. While studying graphic design at the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD), she had to pass by people living on the streets of downtown Toronto—and eventually found she could no longer look away. So Chen gathered some friends and started distributing food to the homeless.
A sandwich often led to conversation—and a new perspective. “I think a lot of us really wanted to understand how people ended up there, what they are like. Who I thought the homeless were was turned upside down because I met previous entrepreneurs and really wealthy people who, through a series of unfortunate events, ended up on the streets.” For instance, a highly educated doctor who wound up homeless after going through a rough divorce.
Chen started seeing homelessness in a new light—a difficult situation that can happen to people of all backgrounds. That realization hit home in 2019 when Chen’s own mother experienced homelessness after a surgery made it difficult for her to find work. “If it was your family, how would you look at things? How would you treat that person you see on the street if she was your mom?” Chen asked in a blog post.
For her undergrad thesis, Chen explored how to use design and technology to help the homeless, redesigning a list of City of Toronto resources into a user-friendly website. She took a tech job after graduation, but a trip to Los Angeles reignited her passion for helping people struggling with homelessness. During a visit to LA’s notorious Skid Row, an area of downtown with a high concentration of homeless individuals, she met a woman teaching computer skills, such as how to craft a resume, to people on the street. What struck Chen? While residents of Skid Row lacked a permanent home, they often had cellphones or access to technology. (In a survey of 421 homeless individuals, 94 percent of respondents said they owned a phone and used it as an essential tool for communication.)
That trip helped Chen envision an opportunity to combine her skills in tech and her passion for helping the homeless. As she had done with her sandwich runs, Chen gathered a group of friends to reach out to the homeless community in Toronto and learn more about their needs.
Simon Bunyi was part of the Ample Labs team when he found himself in the same situation as people they were trying to help. He was laid off from a Fortune 500 company and later evicted from his apartment; this is statistically the most common reason individuals end up homeless in Toronto. Those were his “darkest days,” he says, looking back. “It made me think more about how I interact with people.”
Bunyi had been living in an area of Toronto with a high concentration of people living on the street. He came to realize that the only thing separating himself from them was a regular paycheque. When that disappeared, Bunyi reached out to Chen and Ample Labs to help him navigate the complex network of websites and resources for help. They thought it would be simpler if there were an app for this. And that was the beginning of ChalmersBot. (Watch the full story below.)
So, More Apps for That?
Chen never intended Ample Labs to be more than a side project, but after the beta launch in November 2018, the team of 20 to 30 volunteers realized the service had tremendous potential to help the estimated 235,000 Canadians who will experience homelessness. In the past, that population largely comprised of older, single men, but according to the study, Canada has seen a rise of women and youth ending up on the street. With its ability to tailor resources to specific demographics, ChalmersBot generated attention. Ample Labs raised money from a crowdfunding campaign, grants and corporate sponsors (including TD, Google, and Twitter) and found a home in Ryerson University’s Social Venture Zone. The goal is to generate additional, sustaining revenue selling ChalmersBot services to cities. Barrie, Ont., was the first to buy in. Numerous other cities in Canada and the US have shown interest.
Ample Labs now has 8,000 unique users in Toronto and multiple contractors, prompting Chen to quit her job as a UX designer and become Ample Labs’ first full-time employee. She’s recently hired a second employee and plans to continue expanding the team in 2020. Though the non-profit is experiencing exciting and rapid growth, the culture and core values of Ample Labs remain the same.
“Internally, we’ve built a culture of always learning from each other and making sure it’s diverse voices that are teaching the rest of us,” says Chen. “We want to build something with people, not for people.”
Creating researched and inspirational content to support and advocate for feminist changemaking takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find value and nourishment here, please consider becoming a donor subscriber or patron at a level of your choosing. Priced between a cup of coffee or one take out salad per month.
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This article was made possible thanks to the generosity of Startup Toronto.
Related Reading
https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/03/09/move-over-girlboss-its-the-feministboss-era/
https://www.liisbeth.com/2019/04/26/where-are-the-women-in-canadas-women-in-tech-venture-fund/
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