Product equity: a Practical objective
by Matt May
Hello, and welcome to the final Practical Tips of the year. I’m Matt May, Practical’s founder.
I’ve written 10,343 words since I launched this here newsletter six weeks ago. Thanks to most of you for reading most of them. 😉 This one ties together the topics of the last two weeks, accessibility and inclusive design, with one you may be less familiar with: product equity.
Product equity is relatively new as a term of art. Just like anyone can apply “inclusive design” to any intersection of design and inclusion, however slight—and this is often both how cynics practice it and critics caricature it—one could also do the same with product and equity. Let’s start to put it into context.
First, I want to say that I don’t know who coined “product equity” as a term. I wasn’t the first, and I struggle to piece together who was. At Adobe, it was the result of a brainstorming exercise when my inclusive design team partnered up with our research organization. I think that Annie Jean-Baptiste’s practice at Google was called “Product Inclusion and Equity” before I renamed my team, and that there were one or two similarly-named teams at Meta, along with folks at Airbnb and Uber, who along with Adobe researchers produced an inclusive research guide in 2021. Surely someone got there first. But in my experience, the more someone lays claim to a concept, the less you will want to work with them on furthering it. I think that many of us in overlapping product DEI roles got to equity more or less organically, and then found or built our own communities around it.
Equity is a powerful concept. It’s important to remember that equity is not equality; by definition, it recognizes that we cannot expect equal treatment to occur without recognizing historical and ongoing disparities that cause some people or communities to start with a large advantage.
Here’s a non-tech example: America sucks at soccer. (Sorry: America sucks at football.) In the FIFA world rankings, we’re in a virtual tie with Uruguay, a country with 1% our population. The United States has over 3.5 million active youth players—a literal Uruguay worth. So why aren’t we perennial World Cup contenders?
Uruguay’s “baby fútbol” programs are ubiquitous throughout the country, open to boys and girls, and are free or very low-cost. Kids show up on Saturdays, and they play. There’s even a government agency dedicated to ensuring children access to the sport. Professional teams have access to all the talent in the country, and can offer players slots in their youth academies before signing the best to their own squads, and ultimately to the national team.
Contrast that with American programs: leagues for younger kids can cost hundreds of dollars. Elite traveling teams for teens cost thousands. That’s on top of new equipment for growing kids, private coaching, and sometimes even marketing programs for players to be seen by scouts. Since virtually everything along the line is for-profit, access to higher tiers of the sport are more and more limited to a family’s ability to pay, or hope for some benefactor to support their athlete. A truly elite player without a six-figure bankroll can easily be pushed out of the system by mediocre rich kids trying to bolster their Ivy League applications.
The American approach is inclusion-based. Without making any real attempt at altering the system itself, US Soccer and officials throughout the ranks can only make small, local gestures to truly talented players or teams. A scholarship here, a new field there. But in the face of systemic disparity, the results remain unfair, rich parents are going to tilt the playing field toward their own kids, and the best talent ends up losing out more often than not to the biggest wallet. At a system level, nothing that happens in the frame of inclusion can genuinely affect the inequity of the structure, and that is by design.
The Uruguayan approach is equity-based. (That’s not a guess: it’s literally on the website.) They recognize the roles of every party to the game: not just players, coaches and parents, but also amateur and professional teams, and even spectators and community members. Uruguayan officials recognize that, yes, there are families looking to score big by getting their kid to play professionally, and they have restrictions in place to prevent teams preying on young talent. There’s also a section specifically chartered for promoting girls’ football, in recognition that it’s commonly overshadowed.
Roque Maspoli, winner of one of Uruguay’s two World Cups, explained the small country’s relative success: “From when we are kids we are playing in leagues and tournaments where games matter.” Baby fútbol is not a side project to the teams, or the communities in which they reside. It’s the whole thing. They’ve approached equity systemically, working toward improving it from all perspectives. And that’s how they succeed.
Last week, I mentioned that accessibility is a measurement, but inclusion is an action. Now, I’m about to argue that inclusion is an action, but equity is a measurement. Did I just drive us around in a circle?
Fortunately, no. While accessibility standards measure (for example) web resources against a technical standard, equity standards… don’t exist. Equity is fundamentally a qualitative evaluation of the factors you’re accounting for in the work that you do. For a partnership of any kind to be equitable, it has to meet the needs and wants of each party, on their own terms. And so, while equity is measured, it is measured not by a central authority, but by the consensus of all parties.
At some level, anyone who’s been in a relationship with another human understands how equity and equality differ. In an equal domestic relationship, each partner contributes equally to the household’s income, does an equal amount of the chores, spends an equal amount of time with the kids, etc. But that’s not necessarily what we want in our relationships. We do not enter all partnerships fully equal in all aspects: economic, social, emotional, physical. And we’re not all good with kids, or dishes, or able to earn the same amount. Some give and take always factors in.
Success in a relationship can boil down to whether you are getting more out of it than you’re putting into it. That’s not just a question you ask each day, but over months, years, decades. When your situations change, which is natural in life, you may need to put more of your energy into a relationship, or expect less, or find you need something you’re not getting.
When you take a step back, you should be able to see how equity or inequity manifests in every relationship you have. Do you have a say in the way the other party (which could be a person, company, product, service, etc.) operates toward you or the communities you belong to? Does it help you do something you want? Or does it feel like you’re being taken advantage of? That others have it better than you?
It takes some effort to get an organization to see equity in practice. I think a part of this is that “equity” to most companies is synonymous with stock: the more equity you have, the more control, in legal and economic terms. But if you think of equity less as ownership and more as citizenship, a different picture emerges.
- Who can look at what you have to offer, and see themselves in it?
- How can people be safe from discrimination, harassment or abuse?
- How does your offering adapt to the needs of your community, both at first and over time?
- How are the benefits, both economic and functional, of your product spread out among the people who contribute to it?
If you extract value from a community, you must also contribute to it on at least the same scale. This is where product equity work goes beyond design: you have to evaluate how both customers and impacted communities benefit from the work you propose to do. Some of this would come in the form of that other kind of equity. An equitable company doesn’t throw some gift cards at, say, a focus group made up of blind folks, and then build a company around sighted ownership and staff selling those folks’ wants and needs back to them. (But plenty of inequitable companies do.)
Other forms of equity exist, too: your value can be in making something possible for someone that they couldn’t do before. You don’t need to hire everyone who has an opinion on thrill rides: a good experience for a fair price can be an equitable exchange. Your product can also make the community (be it physical or virtual) in which it resides better in any number of ways. (It just can’t make other communities worse in the process.)
Let’s take generative AI. We know that due to systemic racism, white faces don’t just appear more frequently and more realistically (especially in models that aren’t fine-tuned for racial diversity), they are also likely to be misinterpreted in prompts as superior to other races. For example, a prompt for a Black African doctor helping “white suffering children” still returned images of almost exclusively Black children—and in 5% of cases, a white doctor.
The standard approach to remedy this is via prompt engineering. It’s risky and expensive to rebuild models to properly balance the inputs across races, wait several weeks for it to bake, and hope you get better results. AI companies are more likely to say, hey, let’s slip a note to the gen-AI model to mix up the races of the faces we produce. This may make white faces appear less frequently, but also doesn’t respond to the prompt, which is asking specifically for Black faces. Others may just reject prompts calling for faces to be generated by race, which can have the effect of making it harder to produce diverse imagery based on a racially-homogeneous model. And even if one were successful, how does it benefit a Black doctor to be represented by a jumble of pixels cobbled together by an algorithm, which is itself created from billions of images a company probably never paid a dime for, and reflects decades of historical human bias toward photographing white faces?
If we’re going to be dealing with generative AI in the long term, which right now seems likely, a focus on making equitable products is essential. The Algorithmic Justice League is leading the way on this front, from the perspective of human rights. But there’s also a case for economic justice that requires consideration.
Systems work is hard, and uneven. But when we look at areas like internationalization and security, we see that almost any company will think systemically, when they believe their future depends on it. And I believe a lot of companies popping up today, especially around the AI space, are going to fail if they don’t understand the bias in their models, and therefore, the totality of what they’re selling.
Not only do I think product equity is an essential focus, I believe it should be as important as recruiting and employee experience departments in corporate DEI environments. Every company should be thinking about equity in these three areas:
- Who you are
- How you work
- What you make
We have C-level executives who focus on 1 and 2, and senior managers focusing on the third. It’s time to bring a conscience of how our work impacts humanity to the board room.
I think that’s a good note to end on for 2023.
What’s next?
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Thanks for your support this year. Have a happy holiday season, and I’ll see you in 2024.