Intersectional voices: marking 100 years since women’s suffrage

When Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stood on the House floor publicly denouncing a male representative who had tried to debase her in a professional, public place, many called it the women's rights speech of our generation. This month marks a hundred years since women first gained the right to vote, and this incident presents a timely opportunity to examine the power of women's voices.

Ocasio-Cortez's well-spoken and impassioned clap-back response to the male representative's disrespect solidified her righteousness. She is proof that women have progressed, from having very few rights at the beginning of the 20th century to today, when a woman of color can publicly condemn a white man for his sexism. Still, what does it say about the state of women's voices today that a white man in power thought he could openly disrespect a woman of color, and that the world looks on, proud and dazed by her bravery and willingness to speak out against it?

At the highest levels, we still have a long way to go. No woman has yet been elected as President of the United States, or been a part of a winning ticket as a Vice Presidential candidate (though that may change in 2020); women only make up 24 percent of Congress. This leadership gap exists across our society. In law, women are 45 percent of legal associates, but only 23 percent of partners. Even when promotions are not at stake, the Harvard Business Review researchers found that women are as likely as men to ask for a raise but were 5 percent less likely to receive one. And this isn't just a woman problem, although statistics are biased toward the gender binary. These are just a few examples of many.

Designed by Jordan Shapiro

One hundred years since women’s suffrage and we know the social, economic, and moral incentives for companies and governments to fix this issue. When firms cultivate diverse voices and teams, revenues, and innovation follow; companies that are gender and ethnically heterogeneous perform 25% better than their less inclusive counterparts. Still, when examining the data, the lack of intersectional voices is clear, even in relatively new sectors, like technology, which has the power to shape ongoing narratives of justice and equality in our society.

Technology as a double-edged sword

Digital media has always been a boon for non-traditional voices. Televised Civil Rights protests in the 1960s started a trend of media democratization by building a window by which the public could see real racism on full display for the first time, recorded for posterity. The internet is the modern face of this phenomenon: MeToo, Black Lives Matters, LGBTQI+, and many other movements continue to give voices to the previously marginalized.

The internet stands out as a great equalizer because each person controls their message. Whistleblowers at Uber can write 3,000-word stories detailing a climate of sexual harassment. Ocasio-Cortez can share a Tweet of her response to the belligerent, sexist representative, and many allies stand behind them. 

These new technologies are a revolution for non-dominant voices, a platform for anyone to be heard and change the conversation, but this is only half the story.

The digital technologies shape our lives, societies, and politics, are not, in their foundation, diverse. The companies building and iterating on them, like Apple, Facebook, Google, Twitter, and Microsoft, are more than three-quarters men and more than half white. In the tech sector at large, only 25 percent of the computer science workforce is women. For Black women, the number is just 3 percent. And for the women who do pursue computer science careers, the attrition rate is 62 percent, compared with only 47 percent for men.

Women represent 50 percent of the population and 50.2 percent of the degreed workforce. In tech, which is the foundation for modern society, only one in five computer science degrees go to a woman. In data collected by CIO and Forbes indicate that cultural biases favoring men, lower pay (and smaller raises) for women, and, for 27 percent of surveyed participants, lack of family-friendly benefits contribute to women leaving the field.

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Technology is increasingly integrated into everyday life with emerging concepts and products like big data, facial recognition, and artificial intelligence at the forefront. We know that diversity is good for revenue and innovation, but what does it mean in our society, that white, male-dominated companies have so much power in dictating our future progress as a species?

Bias in product design and data are the symptoms. 

Whether for car safety, bulletproof vests, female sexual dysfunction drugs, or women’s skin care products the gaps in intersectional data and design are pervasive. When manufacturers are testing clothes, drugs, or skin products, they're using information collected majorly white men (and if it’s a woman’s product that does use women’s data, in the case of skin care, they often use only white women’s data). If a firm's research doesn't control for diversity, they may be missing out on broader product adoption, decreasing revenue, or, worse, endangering lives.

Today, this unrepresentative data trains machine learning algorithms, such as facial recognition, which leads to bias that is hardcoded in software. In the United States, facial recognition technologies are best at identifying white faces. On the other hand, Chinese facial recognition software is excellent at identifying East Asian faces but less adept at identifying white or Black faces. These technologies are used by intelligence and law-enforcement agencies, exacerbating existing systemic bias and injustice.

Like any tool, digital technologies have the potential for both positive and negative impact; on the one hand, they are elevating intersectional voices, but on the other, due to lack of diversity in data and culture, they are pushing these voices out. To ensure inclusion, we need to address the foundational problems of diversity in tech.

Addressing the root problems

To support diversity, we first need to address the pipeline problem. If women are only earning one-fifth of computer science degrees compared to their male counterparts, an even smaller percentage are likely to make it to the top companies in the world. Research to find the causation of the pipeline problem brings a lot of correlated issues to the forefront: lack of role models, lack of curriculum that supports girls, even lack of encouragement; this is even further exacerbated for BIPOC girls. In studies where children were asked to draw scientists, young girls drew men twice as often as they depicted women, showing that whatever the causation is, it likely begins from a young age.

Next, there is a culture problem, and it is much broader than Big Tech. Pew Research found that 43 percent of US working women have experienced gender discrimination, twice as likely as men. In Silicon Valley, the home of the biggest tech firms globally, 66 percent of women report feeling excluded from crucial networking and social opportunities because of gender. 

Finally, there is a pay gap, and this isn't new. Across the board, firms have always paid women less than men. For women of color, it's even less. The tech industry, for all its progress, falls into the same traps as the rest of society in promoting women and women of color.

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For the sake of humanity, we need to get this right.

Modern digital companies are some of the most significant and successful companies in the history of humanity. They innovate on and subvert traditional business practices in so many ways, but this does not mean they are exempt from other societal traps. Society has come a long way empowering and amplifying an ever more diverse intersection of voices. There is a long road ahead for all voices to be valued equally to those of the traditional, white male establishments.

Governments are increasingly adding big data collection processes, machine learning, and artificial intelligence into legislation and institutions. If we do not address systemic bias in these technologies, we risk slowing or even regressing many of the gains that intersectional voices have made.

On August 18, 1920, Tennessee became the last state needed to ratify the 19th amendment, enfranchising women of the time and all future generations. One hundred years later, through intersectional activists' tireless progress, non-traditional voices are louder than ever, but still not equal.

Looking to the future, we must rectify data gaps, hire diverse teams in gender, race, and orientation, and fix pipeline and culture problems. For tech companies to spur the next level of product adoption and consumer trust, they must overturn traditional discriminatory practices in favor of radical diversity; society's future depends on it. 

Correction: an earlier version of this article claimed that the 19th Amendment created universal suffrage. The United States did not provide universal suffrage until 1957; Native Americans were the last to receive this right.