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Excluding non-binary people by design: How sign-up forms can lead to discrimination

Sarah on March 01, 2021

What happens when we don’t include trans and non-binary people in our products? How do our products cause harm? Why is education so important and c...
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filipac profile image
Filip Iulian Pacurar

But in what cases would advertise to non-binary genders help? Like, take example, tampons or absorbents. A business selling this would like to know if you have a menstrual cycle or not, right? It would not be possible to know that from your custom gender you entered.. just thinking out loud.

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Sarah

This is about letting advertisers exclude non-binary people from housing and job ads. As explained in the article, google doesn't allow excluding people from job, housing or credit ads based on gender, but does let advertisers filter out non-binary people as a result of poorly designed forms and data structures.

And your question is actually a really good point why advertising based on gender, especially when it's very binary, doesn't work well. Trans men and non-binary people can need menstrual products. And trans women may not need them.

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Bill Raymond • Edited

It’s really important to note that the article is saying Google made a bad design decision that then excludes people based on gender. Maybe or maybe not on purpose, but it appears that it does.

While you went right to tampons, you might consider that there is an opportunity for companies to sell products and services to specific audiences across all markets and not just hygiene products. There are thousands of brands, including banks, clothing designers, the travel industry, and anything in between looking to service a typically underserved market.

As developers, we always have that need to solve for custom fields in our products. Since we don’t know exactly what someone might put there, we let them type whatever they want. After a period of use, you can see patterns and then ponder adjusting your app to support what people hand-type most frequently. For example, Google could probably run a super simple algorithm to learn that NB, N-B, non binary, and Non-binary are all the same thing and simply offer non-binary as an option. Further, anyone in the gender inclusion space can spend about an hour typing up a list for Google to start with.

If that’s not how you identify, don’t select it. If it is, you feel more welcome. Advertisers are eager to reach new customers, so that helps them target typically underserved markets and gain trusted relationships. Also, Google gets itself away from adding custom, hand-typed data to reduce engineering problems and increase profits.

As for Google not allowing advertising for housing and other services that, at least in the US, could be seen as discriminatory, this is something very concerning. I have not investigated it, so only have this article to go by, but if it is the case, then it is worth getting Google to make change, either from within or through support of your elected officials.

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Tatiana

Kudos to bringing light to something we should all be mindful of.

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

You either identify yourself as man or woman

Do you realize you're accusing a huge bunch of people of lying about something you have absolutely no way of confirming?

Might as well claim that headaches don't exist. You just have no way whatsoever to confirm this.

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emmabostian profile image
Emma Bostian ✨ • Edited

And I think you should take your BS out of this comment section.

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yatil profile image
Eric Eggert

Oh, shut up and get a grip.

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Gabriel Guzman

Thanks for this informative post! So many things we don't think about when we build things. Good argument for ensuring we create diverse teams.

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darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

I think treating this as a gender issue is missing the point. Google doesn't care about non-binary people, nor does it care about binary people. Google cares about advertisers.

If you enter a custom gender on your profile, you're adding lots of complexity that google just has no business incentive to untangle. How would you normalise gender data? how would the UI look like? What about languages other than english?

Honestly, being able to select gender at all is a footgun. Google knows better than you, who your ad should be shown to. It's probably in their best interest to be able to show ads to everyone they think might click them, so if they're giving the option to override this clearly shows that there's probably a demand among advertisers for this.


In conclusion: Google doesn't care about any of us. We're all just data points that can be discarded when they can't be processed.

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Emma Bostian ✨

Google may not care about any of us but it is indeed a gender issue..?

 
darkwiiplayer profile image
𒎏Wii 🏳️‍⚧️

I never said headaches don't exist

Whether or not there are more than two genders is a question of how you define the word. But that's not what you're saying.

You're saying people can't identify as anything other than man or woman. What people identify as is completely within their heads. You just can't claim people don't identify as anything other than male or female without actually looking into their minds.

Biologically there's no more than 2 genres

Okay, so I will assume you define gender as a purely biological thing, most likely decided by peoples genitalia, am I correct? In that case, assuming you still use gender-specific pronouns, why are you so obsessed with what's between peoples legs that you have to structure your sentences according to it? Creepy!

Jokes aside, defining gender based only on biologic sex is mostly useless to society.

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