Google employees attending a Pride parade. Photo: Noah Berger/Reuters
Ladies and gentlemen, there’s something missing, and you might have missed it.
When you’re young you’re taught to count. Surely you remember being proud of being able to count higher than 10? I do. It was cool. How do you count? 1… 2…3… 4… etc? However, later, you were in, perhaps 3rd grade. You learned about division. Fractions. Numbers that were part of a whole. Suddenly, counting isn’t all math is. Now there’s numbers in between numbers. How many numbers are between numbers? As many as there are numbers. How many numbers are there? Infinite.
It’s like taking analog data and putting it into digital storage. We do it all the time. You’re reading this on something digital. It may have fooled your brain into thinking it’s analog, but it’s not. Tiny squares, placed in close approximation to simulate an image. 1’s and 0’s, just ways to try to define everything. All numbers, all bits, everything can be broken down into digital form.
But it loses the infinite in-between because between 0 and 1 is infinity. 0.1, 0.2, 0.21, 0.2111… and so on, forever. You trade an infinite spectrum for absolutes, and you’ll lose something in the process. Reality is infinitely small and infinitely large, and it does not fit in binary.
And neither do people.
Someone ought to tell Google.
Google, like Facebook and anyone else, allows advertisers to target people based on a variety of things. They try to prevent discrimination with their tools. You can’t advertise a job to a man that you’re not also advertising to a woman, for example.
But Google forgot just how much exists outside of binaries.
They forgot to protect non-binary users from discrimination in hiring and housing. Now they’re rushing to fix that.
In This Article:
“Accidental,” “Unwitting” Discrimination
Multiple news reports have labeled this as Google’s “accident.” Google “unwittingly” enabled job, housing, and financial discrimination based on a user’s gender. How much of it was really an accident? “Accident” implies a mistake, something that happens that isn’t anyone’s fault. But this wasn’t a mistake, it was the inevitable outcome from Google’s actions.
Gender at Google
When you sign up for a new Google account, you have four options for your gender. The first two you’re likely familiar with, male or female. The next two are “Prefer Not to Say” and a custom option. For the custom option, users could write in however they want to identify. I’ve been using “non-binary” frequently in this article, but some people may prefer a different classification. Non-binary can be an umbrella term for people who may be NB trans-femme, agender, or other genders that don’t strictly fit into “male” and “female.” It’s a good system, allowing people to opt out of sharing their gender with Google as well as defining it themselves.
Male and female go into their own categories for tracking. But the “Prefer Not to Say” and custom options go under Google’s “Unknown” category. This is Google’s catch-all for non-binary gender categories and people who said they “prefer not to say.”
A “Rainbow-Colored Band-Aid”
When creating a new ad on Google, initially they’re very loosely targeted. Google defaults to targeting female, male, and “unknown” genders. Because it’s illegal to discriminate based on gender in considerations of employment, housing, and financial matters, Google’s back-end has a few overrides. If an advertiser is advertising a job posting and tries to forbid targeting of women, Google’s back end will automatically target men and women. This protection doesn’t apply to non-binary users, even though that may be illegal.
According to Pauline Kim, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis, if a company intentionally cut out non-binary or transgender people from advertising for job positions or other protected category, they could potentially be in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1965. The Supreme Court recently decided that gender identity and sexual orientation fall under this protection as well.
In other words, excluding non-binary people from advertising for employment, housing, or financial services would be illegal.
So who’s breaking the law?
Caught in the Act?
The Markup’s own research found two companies that were intentionally not advertising to non-binary users: FedEx and a California-based pest control company, Dewey Pest Control. A spokesperson for Google, Elijah Lawal, said that Google found at least 100 others in their brief examination. There could be far more.
Since Google’s tool defaults to targeting “unknown” genders, to cover non-binary or gender non-conforming people, companies had to make a conscious decision to cut these people out. They had to decide they didn’t want to hire non-binary people.
FedEx, when pressed for comment refused to do so. A FedEx spokesperson, Shannon Davis, said FedEx would not comment “on our specific marketing or recruiting processes.” Dewey Pest Control didn’t respond to The Markup for comment. These companies may have made the decision to discriminate based on gender in hiring, specifically, anyone who didn’t fit the gender binary. They may have broken the law.
No wonder they don’t want to chat.
Untold People Cut Out
One out of four transgender people have lost a job due to discrimination. Three out of four transgender people report facing some form of workplace discrimination. Because of this, transgender unemployment is two times the national average for cisgender people. And that was before the pandemic. The pandemic has hit women and minorities the hardest. Traditionally discriminated against groups were the first to get layoffs. This likely hit transgender people, including non-binary people, disproportionately hard.
It’s hard to seek justice in cases like this. “You don’t even know what you don’t see,” Kendra Albert, a technology law instructor at Harvard Law School pointed out. Non-binary people wouldn’t even know they faced discrimination. They wouldn’t know they’re owed something. Instead, once it’s proven that something is happening, a legal group, like ACLU, may have to find a plaintiff or group of people who can reasonably assume the ads passed them over. The Department of Justice or the Department of Housing and Urban Development could fine Google and the companies, like FedEx, potentially, who are found to have intentionally discriminated against users based on protected categories. That’s what happened when Facebook was allowing advertisers to illegally target only men for job postings.
Google is as guilty as those who intentionally decided to cut out non-binary people from hiring or housing. While FedEx and others may have left non-binary people out of their hiring process, it was Google that made it possible. How could Google’s involvement be “accidental” or “unwitting?” The discrimination started with them.
Homogeneous Teams Make Boring Worlds
If you take an image and remove the saturation almost entirely, it can create something that looks boring, stale, and depressing. You’ve taken some aspect of uniqueness out of the image. You stole a part of its soul.
It’s a good metaphor for corporate America. It’s almost too easy of a metaphor to make, but you’re under-representing the colors of the rainbow. Oh, they’re there, they’re just not well represented.
LGBTQ+ people often go into software engineering. Why? If you ask a queer person, they’ll give you a number of reasons and theories. Many of them will line up and start to form a picture. A lonely kid in high school. They figured out they were gay, or trans, or just… different. They go online and find other people who are similarly different. Eventually, they’ll become engrossed in nerdy online culture. They begin to become fascinated with the clockwork of the machine they stare into for companionship and familiarity. One day, they learn to make the clock tick how they choose. They learn programming.
Online, there’s less discrimination, in the right bubbles, anyway. But you can pick and choose your bubbles. You can learn software development and make a career for yourself, avoiding the discrimination that the business world might throw your way. In much the same way LGBTQ+ people find themselves drawn to the arts to express themselves with methods known only to them, others found their way to cold machines and breathed their own life into them.
There are many LGBTQ+ people in software. So where are all the gay and transgender CEOs?
Over-Present, Under-Represented
LGBTQ+ people may have gotten into software to avoid discrimination, but they’ll find nothing but it. From the venture capitalists who outright refuse to invest in a queer person’s startup to the managers who think someone “just isn’t right for management.” Queer people are rare in positions of power, and they often have to erase or hide a part of themselves to climb up.
How does Google forget non-binary people? Simple. There weren’t any non-binary people making decisions.
While tech may be full of gender and sexuality minorities, tech leadership is as bland as an image with the saturation sucked out. It’s the same reason AI discriminates against Black people and women. Because not enough Black people and women were involved with the design of the AI. If you want to stop discrimination, you have to stop discriminating.
It’s that simple. Google didn’t “accidentally” or “unwittingly” discriminate against non-binary people with their product. No. Google discriminated against non-binary people in hiring and promotions. The binary people who made it through Google’s analog to digital filter forgot the infinite in-between they left behind.
More Color, Fewer “Mistakes”
YouTube, one of Google’s properties, repeatedly discriminates against transgender people.
I actually have experience here. A company I worked for a few years back had a registration page, like most companies. It asked for the user’s gender: male or female. Right from the start, I pointed out how many people this left out. I was given excuses. Advertisers want to target men or women, they’d say. I’d point out that then they’ll leave non-binary people behind. That we’re leaving potential non-binary customers behind. It wasn’t until a while later, when the entire internal LGBTQ+ group start speaking up did we start planning out a non-binary option. I left the company before they implemented it. Still, if you go to their signup page, you’ll find a third, ambiguous, gender option.
It’s a start.
That change only happened because enough LGBTQ+ people worked at that company that they could band together and make people outside of our community realize that this was a problem for our users. I had to tell them that I have friends who would not want to use our app because it forces them to mark down a gender that is not their own. It took time and effort, but we got it changed.
Gaps of Ignorance
“We will be implementing an update to our policy and enforcement in the coming weeks to restrict advertisers from targeting or excluding users on the basis of the ‘gender unknown category.”
– Elijah Lawal, Google Spokesperson
Google has had multiple gender options for some time now. They did even better than my company on the options front. However, they didn’t create the necessary back-end measures to prevent discrimination from slipping through the cracks. They continued to allow advertisers to select either male, female, or male and female, but none of the other options. They left room for discrimination because they didn’t know better.
The best way to stop discrimination is to stop discriminating. A lot of people have to wake up to that truth. Your internal policies, official or not, become external policies at a much larger scale than you may have realized. It’s a cycle, an extrapolation. It’s the infinite in-between filling in the blind spots. To support diverse users, to support users in the real world, you’re going to need diverse employees from that real world. It’s time to bump the resolution and saturation up.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve left out the theydies and gentlethems. Let’s get everyone back in the mix.
Sources:
- I. Bonifacic, Engadget
- Jeremy B. Merrill, The Markup
- Josh Milton, PinkNews