
The health-technology sector overlooks women and their bodies - DanBC
https://www.the-pool.com/health/health/2018/31/Caroline-O-Donoghue-on-Fitbit-period-health-tech-women
======
docdeek
"Journalist Alexandra Heminsley noticed that neither Apple Watch nor Fitbit
let you log pushing a pram as exercise, despite the fact that everything from
barre to Zumba was there already. Jogging prams are absolutely everywhere
now...and yet, according to Apple and Fitbit, it’s not happening.”

As a runner and a parent, this might annoy me. However, is it really a sign of
(concious or unconscious) sexism? Don’t men run with prams in the US?

~~~
arrrg
Yeah, if pushing a pram is seen as a stereotypically “female” activity and
because of tat further outside the lived reality of the men writing the
software, then it could be sexism.

I do agree, though, that this is more generally something indicating that
diversity in teams working on software all kinds of people use is important. I
think a father could just as well have helped out here, because I can’t
imagine that you wouldn’t immediately think of pushing the pram as an activity
you want to track if you were a parent heavily involved with your child. It’s
obvious, really.

~~~
kalleboo
I push a pram every day but I think of it as "walking" not "pushing a pram",
if I was working on this feature it would not be obvious to me to include it
as a separate activity.

I don't have much experience with activity trackers though. Do they also have
option for if you're carrying a backpack or not, and other similar minor
consequential details?

~~~
arrrg
They might differentiate between walking and hiking, for example.

~~~
TheSpiceIsLife
What differentiates hiking from walking?

~~~
mbreese
If I were to guess, I’d say altitude differences and terrain. It takes less
energy to walk on flat, paved sidewalks than to hike a trail.

~~~
llampx
GPS can take care of altitude gain/loss. Rougher terrain may well have greater
calorie burn though.

------
LTom
One of the reasons for period tracking is identifying changes to one's
menstrual cycle, which may indicate health issues.[1] So even if periods
normally were to only last up to 10 days, not allowing to track for a longer
period would impede that goal. In fact, this is even one the vague reasons
Fitbit mentioned when it launched this functionality. [2] The functionality
feels like a bit of an afterthought.

[1]
[https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320758.php](https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320758.php)

[2] [https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17113096/fitbit-watch-
per...](https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17113096/fitbit-watch-period-
tracking-wearable-fitness)

------
kowdermeister
> Only 40% of professional designers are women

So the glass is almost empty. I get it.

~~~
belorn
The line which researchers here in Sweden define that a profession is gender
segregated is if it has less than 40% of a single gender. It comes out to
about 90% of the population, both men and women, work in gender segregated
professions and only 10% work in the remaining gender equal professions which
would include professional designers.

If we set the bar higher than a minimum of 40% then we are quickly going into
single digit percent of the population. There is very few professions with an
exact 50/50 ratio.

------
imarg
What is interesting, is this reply to the tweet mentioned in the article
([https://twitter.com/JeremiahLee/status/1025424090184728576](https://twitter.com/JeremiahLee/status/1025424090184728576))
where this former(?) fitbit employee says that actually there were women
involved in this feature.

~~~
brlewis
Disclaimer: I work for Fitbit, but don't speak for Fitbit.

Thank you for bringing attention to this very important point. From the tweet:

"FWIW this feature was led by women (product manager, head of product,
engineering manager). I am not defending the design & I understand that it
fails to meet your expectations. Fitbit isn't that big and the people there
care a lot about helping people."

A later reply by a current employee: "Also, the algorithm development was led
by a woman."

This is just another software flaw, not a demonstration of rampant sexism. I'd
ask commenters here (in general, not replying to the parent comment) to curb
their outrage. And if things like this really bother you, apply to one of our
many open positions.

~~~
imarg
Yeah, as I said before in another comment I would be surprised "if the people
that designed the Fitbit's period tracking feature did not include or at least
consulted women".

I take your comment (and the tweet I linked) as being correct about my
assumption.

As a non-American (I am European) I am always amazed about how easily things
like that are attributed to gender (non) inclusion in the USA. On the other
hand, as a male I have to always wonder if I find these kind of reactions over
the top not because I am not American but because of my gender.

~~~
brlewis
In this particular case, the problem is that everybody thinks that if you
include women you'll get menstruation right. This applies both to Fitbit
assuming we didn't need to consult a gynecologist, and to outsiders assuming
Fitbit must not have put women on the project.

More generally, there is a lot of sexism, at least in the U.S., which makes
people more inclined to see it everywhere...it's a natural human bias.

------
ralusek
There are many things about this article that I really dislike.

1.) The implication that a statistical outlier not being represented is
something that would have been fixed by having more female engineers.

How much of an outlier is it for a woman to have a period exceeding 10 days in
length? 1 in 15? 1 in 100? Is it not relevant? Would the 14/15 women who are
not themselves these statistical outliers be roughly just as likely as men to
lack this information? Presumably they would have a chance to be exposed to it
by family/friends/relationships, but isn't that the same for the men? This
sounds like either a problem with the FitBit team having not done proper
research, or this being such a statistical outlier that it's an understandable
mistake. Do the programmers on a diabetes bloodsugar reader need to themselves
have diabetes, or is it not reasonable to suggest that they should instead be
as well informed as needed to build the product?

2.) The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do
with _anything_ other than...the lack of female engineers.

3.) The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every
application for the general public. If there was a nutritional application
that didn't account for Celiac's disease, or a running app that didn't
properly accommodate somebody's asthma, I'm not so sure that the right idea is
to determine that this app needs to cover all such cases. There are market
forces at work here, if there is a need for it, i.e. asthmatic runners who are
unsatisfied with XYZ apps, then there is an opportunity. If you have longer-
than-10 day periods, and FitBit doesn't change, you have a market opportunity.
If it doesn't do well...there wasn't enough of a market. Or I guess we can
just demand that all apps are built by diabetic asthmatic women to cover our
bases.

~~~
mcphage
> Presumably they would have a chance to be exposed to it by
> family/friends/relationships, but isn't that the same for the men?

Well, how long is the longest period that your female family members have had?
Is this a thing you discuss with them?

> The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do
> with anything other than...the lack of female engineers.

You're bothered by the implication that thing have consequences?

> The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every
> application for the general public.

You mean the fact that period trackers need to be able to track periods?

------
cimmanom
And this is also part of why gender diversity on technical teams matters.

~~~
bsaul
i wouldn't blame the technical team for lack of "social diversity" if a stock
trading app lacked an important feature.

I would instead blame it on the people specifying the product features for not
knowing their market ( and that usually is someone like a product owner).

Note that i clearly agree that having more people inside the company actually
representing the target audience is a plus, but that's just a general rule, it
doesn't apply specifically to having more women in tech team ( which i think
is a nice idea, if only because tech is an interesting field to work in and
women shouldn't miss this opportunity)

~~~
cimmanom
So who’s to blame for more women dying in car crashes than men because there
were no female crash test dummies?

Don’t you think that having women on the development teams might have helped
catch the fact that voice recognition software didn’t recognize female voices
before the software ever made it to QA, rather than after release?

~~~
bsaul
About car crash dummies: i know nothing about that field, but i suppose crash
test dummies are build to represent the "most average human being", gender
neutral. The fact that women are a subcategory that require specially
manufactured dummies is i think a scientific discovery. Not something the
average person would have guessed... I suppose there are other subcategories (
obese peopl, old people, short people) that probably would benefit for custom
made crash test..

On female voices not being recognized i'd like you to show me the article that
tell this story, because it seems so obvious that i'm having a hard time
believing it ( looks like something as obvious as understanding people
speaking with different accents).

~~~
cimmanom
But that just the thing. When only or mostly men are involved, “gender
neutral” ends up being masculine (like the crash test dummies that had height
and weight distributions like average men, not like average humans) because
that’s our societal default. “Oh, women are a special subcategory.” No, we’re
not. We’re half the fucking population.

~~~
bsaul
Let's take the car dummy example. Do you think gender is one of the most
relevant distinction if you'd really want to dig interesting clues from your
team, that professionals wouldn't have thought of ?

If i were a team leader honestly i wouldn't care about gender first. I'd be
more interested in recruiting people from different weights, sizes, ages,
maybe even races, and medical backgrounds first. And then, maybe gender would
come into play.

For some problems gender is an important factor, for others it's not. The fact
that this "gender" predicate divides the world into two half doesn't make it
relevant per say. I could divide between blue eyes and brown eyes, or skin
tan, or lactose tolerant, etc, and come up with fairmy big chunks.

Now I do agree that differences between men and women are indeed so important
that it's an very interesting criteria in many topics. Although for some
reason i don't think that's the argument you want to base your reasoning upon.

