Um Hello everyone. Uh It's a pleasure today to talk with you about this topic that is near and dear to my heart. And I should mention that there's no way I can do this topic justice in the 20 minutes we have.So I'll be touching on what I believe to be the most critical aspects. And since this is a conference celebrating uh women in tech, many of the examples will focus on women in tech. But I want to emphasize that gender is but one axis of diversity, we hear a lot about how important it is to have diversity, inclusion on teams. But I think it's important to cleanly draw a connection between diverse teams and the inclusive product development that results from this.

It's because we see the world not as it is but as we are. And I think schema theory as a basic concept can help dive us in into this further. For those of you who are familiar, the uh theory suggests that our understanding of the world is formed by a network of abstract mental structures. A schema is both the category of knowledge as well as the process of acquiring that knowledge. So as experiences happen and new information is presented, new schemas are developed and old schemas are changed or modified. If we look at gender schemas, they assign different psychological traits to males and females. These include stereotypically thinking of men as task oriented, rational capable leaders and women as nurturing and emotionally expressive. These hypotheses often conflict with consciously held or explicit attitudes and are shared by both males and females. Once schemas are activated, they direct and skew our perceptions even in the face of objective information that contradicts the schema. And this can be very dangerous because it can show up as gender bias in the workplace and impact many different things from salaries to advancement and opportunities.

But how does this impact product development? Let's talk about just one example to understand this a bit better, the most used electronic product, the world over mobile phones. But more specifically the smartphone, as you can see, nearly half of the world population is using smartphones and nearly half of that is women and yet most smartphones are too big to fit comfortably into the average woman's hand as phones have continued to get larger over the years, while women's hands have remained an average 117 millimeters shorter than Ben's hands.

And sociologist Zeynep Tufekci actually reported famously, her irritation at not being able to document tear gas used during the Gizzy protests in Turkey because her phone was too big for her to take pictures one handed. She said all my photos from that event are obviously unusable.

For one simple reason, good smartphones are designed for male hands and if that's not enough, the clothing industry adds insult to injury. It's not like we can carry these large phones in our pockets comfortably either since on average, they're shrinked and pinked to be 48% shorter and 6.5% narrower than men's pockets. But let's not get sidetracked because there's more about the smartphone itself. Apps also aren't catered to women.

For instance, 49% of women play mobile games, but few are made for women. Famously, the Apple health app when it was first introduced covered many basic health care tracking features except for period tracking, leaving out half of its demographic glow. Another very popular period in fertility tracking app is ironically founded by paypal's Max Lek and four other men. Women's health apps are treated like niche products as opposed to the mass market products they should be. And in the worst of cases, dating app companies which inhabit a multibillion dollar industry have put women in harm's way due to a lack of safety checks resulting in harassment and sexual assault. How is all of this and more the case when women are 50% of the population making 70 to 80% of the world's consumer spending decisions. And as a result in control of the deployment of more than 40 trillion a year. Well, let's continue with our example and start by looking at the origin of smartphones, the leading smartphone vendors providing us with the hardware and firmware are Samsung and Apple. The two most globally popular Os S are owned by Apple and Google creating a duopoly. And if we look at the global app downloads, we see that two most dominant app providers are Facebook and Google.

So when it comes to the smartphone ecosystem, there are four dominant tech companies behind all of the products for the hardware OS S apps, you name it and it's actually very difficult to find an available solution with feature parody that's not created by one or more of these tech giants.

You could go with nokia or less well known to like K Os or something. But the options are fairly limited and not only that, but you're probably gonna find that these alternatives will not be as well integrated with your other technology and those with your friends and family.

So you can end up being a bit of an outsider. An obvious part of the explanation for this problem is that men control most of these companies, male run firms uh receive about 82% of the venture capital funding and entrepreneurs often build products to solve problems and that address needs that affect them personally. I mean, it's no grand intentional or malignant conspiracy. Men just may be unaware of the problems women face. They may not flag up obvious areas of concern or ask the right questions. When doing their research. Like in the iphone's health app example, we just talked about once an idea gets the green light, it will then be handled uh by product design and engineering teams. Three quarters of whose members are men. These teams often use data to make decisions. But lumping all users together means they may fail to spot trends based on sex differences. So reliance on historical data and the sparsity of data on underrepresented groups can also create bias in algorithms. Well, it's also interesting to note that these companies are also mainly concentrated in California.

Um I also threw in uh the other two of the big five tech giants for posterity that happens to be headquartered in Washington State, which means that the West Coast demographics, schemas culture and backgrounds are what influenced the majority of these technologies. The predominant makeup of the workforce for these companies is a group of people that are overrepresented and profoundly unrepresentative of the cumulative world's population, especially if we return to our example and look at smartphone penetration across the globe, we can see quite a varied representation of the worldwide population.

So now that we've established how critical it is to foster not only gender but all kinds of diversity on teams to create safer ethical inclusive products. Let's talk about how we actually create these teams. I'll start with an example from my own life to illustrate some key things to consider. Originally, I'm from Turkey. Um I went with the flow of the Turkish education system for a while. It's a talk for another time and for better or worse, this led me to explore many different directions. I started off in industrial design for a flash and time. Then my love of language brought uh brought me over to um simultaneous interpretation. I then moved into management and started focusing on hospitality specifically. And this is where my appreciation for end to end holistic service design really started to take a hold. At that time, I also started to get interested in web design and development. I continued to work in the field for longer and decided to pursue my master's in human centered design and engineering, which is around the time when I got my first big break with an opportunity to work on the very first kindle for Amazon. This may sound controversial to some of you, but I do not believe in the myth of a self made man or woman. In fact, it perpetuates a very dangerous idea that all we need is to do hard work and we will be successful.

We all start with some set of privileges that puts us a few steps ahead of others. You can add preparation, grit and a dash of luck into the mix. However, if there are barriers to opportunities or complete lack thereof and or advocacy in the form of sponsorship aren't available to you. It will make your journey a lot harder and in some cases impossible. So if we look at what it takes to get where you need to be, you need to bring potential preparation and grit, but also opportunity and sponsorship need to be available to you. Let's examine my case based on a more old school hiring approach. I had several things stepped stacked up against me. At that time, I hadn't completed a formal design degree. I had an associates and was in the middle of my master's program. This alone would have cut me out of more traditional process. Immediately. My work experience was limited to freelance and very small companies only. So anyone looking for big brand name companies would have overlooked me. There were no big tech opportunities where I grew up in Turkey or most places I eventually lived in the US that is until we moved to the West Coast. I hope you see the connection there.

Some of my identity attributes being a woman and a foreign national also put me in a position where I could be discriminated against. But my amazing hiring manager saw the potential in me and my preparation for something like this. He extended the opportunity to me. And in turn, I brought some unique expertise and perspective into the product that would have been missing otherwise, to create the kind of end to end hiring practices that are supportive of diverse team building. Let's look at what needs to go into sourcing, hiring and retention.

So the first thing I would say is that Externalizing your company's DN I commitments once they're formalized is the first step in establishing accountability. So the first thing we need to do is to establish accountability. Next is ensuring you're setting goals in the form of visible company.

OKRS for measurable impact following up from that using internal surveys to keep a pulse and measuring employee perceptions of inclusion and diversity, as well as regular external audits for an impartial assessment and progress is key resources and trainings especially for allies internal to the company support underrepresented groups.

It it's incredibly helpful to foster an inclusive culture. Next, take a look at your end to end hiring practices. Schmidt Hunter found that reference checks, years of experience and education were significantly worse at assessing if someone will perform well on a role compared to things like structured interviews, work examples and collaborative sessions. The next thing is to determine your sourcing strategy. First, get this piece right?

Culture fit preserves comfort and familiarity. While culture a looks for people who value an organization, standards and culture, but also brings something different that positively contributes to your company. So the hi hiring question then shifts from what is this person lacking to what can this person bring to the table apprenticeship and return ship programs to attract talent that would otherwise be overlooked due to the lack of experience or having been out of the workforce for a while due to parenting difficult duties, for instance, is really important.

It's also important to create an even playing field where opportunities are available to people where otherwise they may not be so remote work and flexible hours are just one way to ensure this happens, identify representation gaps to ensure you source underrepresented groups based on team and leveling needs and ensure blind sourcing.

That's another really important part of the process. You can see here how different kinds of bias can creep in, right? We have the halo effect. Um If they worked at Google, well, they must be a strong candidate at following up with confirmation bias. Well, they were only there for three months, but if they hired them in the first place, they must be good affinity bias. You know, they must be smart. This was hard to complete um or stereotype bias they studied in Cambridge. So they must be smart and good for this role. Not to mention that the name here is fairly uh white and male presenting, which could also bias the sourcing process. Uh following up from that standardizing your hiring practices is also another really key aspect of this um aligning on assessment criteria and creating standardized, standardized interview questions as well as feedback templates is key um ensuring there is diversity in recruiting teams and interview panels is also really important as well as the the right training to prepare them um making diversity, a teambuilding goal that the whole team shares in and is excited about is another key thing.

So that's a priority for everyone to work on. But hiring more people from underrepresented groups isn't enough. The environment needs to be healthy and supported, uh supportive of them for retention. So, Harvard Business Review found that teams with cognitive diversity were by and far the most successful.

This is more about the versatility and how to approach problems. They also found that these teams can only be formed in psychologically safe environments where people feel safe to be able to respectfully challenge, strongly held beliefs or decisions made about a, a feature or product to create the healthy environment. Um You need to make sure that your teams feel comfortable setting boundaries with work and that company culture supports this. Um There need to be sponsorship programs for underrepresented groups. Um This is extremely important in helping advance them into opportunities that they may not otherwise have access to and having a product development process and rituals in place that have built in mechanisms to empower those to challenge ideas and put user needs first is also key.

So um a word on why I place emphasis on sponsorship and not mentorship. A mentor advises the mentee and sponsors advocate for their proteges. Your sponsor is the person who will speak on your behalf when you're not in the room. He or she will put your name forward for opportunities that you would have no way of knowing about. And I want to give us a few examples of tools and frameworks of empowerment you can use in your day to day to challenge thoughts and directions to ensure the right decisions are made, being made in product development, in different phases of it. Right? In idea generation, the first thing to ask is, are we even focusing on the right problems? Maybe finding out what kinds of uh underrepresented groups might this impact? And which ways research and data is key here. Um in the idea screening phase using methods like the steeple framework for risk assessment of different kinds is also really important um in in research, making sure that participant recruiting practices are ethical, that user journeys are another tool for us to anchor the conversation on the user is very, very helpful within design, designing with the the users of the product is really important.

So co creation sessions come to mind and using tarot cards of tech or other tools and brainstorms and sprints can get us to better consider the consequences of our decisions. Um And finally, analysis, establishing a user centric uh metric framework like heart uh make framework is is really really good. Um development is is really key to look at implementation reviews so that we understand is what we designed, what is actually going to put out, being put out into the world. Um And is there a match between those two? It's really key and for launch, having launch checklist that include key things like accessibility is another really, really big piece. All of this is a lot of work. But if companies need further convincing these hard facts should quash any remaining doubts. Study. After countless study indicate that mixed gender teams are more generous and egalitarian and that teams with larger percentage of women perform better by building meaningful relationships and creating successful work processes. In fact, profits increase as the share of women increases up to 50%. Inclusive teams make better decisions.

87% of the time teams that follow an inclusive process, make decisions twice as fast with half the meetings and decisions made and executed by diverse teams deliver 60% better results. So I hope it's clear that the more numerous expansive and richer our schemas that we bring into our teams, the better chance we'll be able to approach things from many different perspectives and um it will help us create more successful and better products. Here's to hoping that one day by the time my five year old daughter joins the workforce, this talk will be rendered obsolete. Thank you for listening.