 is one, I just really wanted to see and be involved in how UX is developing here, but also I'm really interested in understanding women and work in India, because I know all about the US cultural experience of working in a corporation, but I do not claim to know anything about being in India and working here, so my perspective today is very much from the US perspective, and my research was done when I was in Seattle, so I'd be really happy to hear your points of view of what sounds about the same and what would be different from an Indian perspective. So, is your product gender neutral? This, as I said, I worked at Microsoft for 17 years in user experience, and I got to work with a variety of teams, but obviously, what I started to realize, the teams were very male dominant, and the question was not so much about how women work, it was trying to take a business perspective of, we talk a lot about the need for diversity, but what does that really mean and how does it translate into business? So, first of all, let's look at why it matters. Quick history lesson, we're bore you with the details, way, way, way back, there were centralized mainframe computers, you had to go to a room where a computer was, it was huge, it did just a few things, it didn't matter whether you're male, female, old or young, the computer was designed just to do one thing, no variation, no customization. Next, personal computers in the 90s, they were very much based on office-based tasks, word processing, spreadsheets, still not much customization, personalization doesn't matter who you are, the tasks were pretty similar. Moving on, modern day, now we're looking at mobile computing, social computing, internet of things, it is becoming more and more integrated into our lives, into how we move around, and that means that all those differences that we know exist or have guesses around gender or age and really start to show up in how we should be designing technologies. So the future is, it's absolutely everywhere, it's in medicine, health, transportation, robots helping out, I mean, it's going everywhere, so there's no stopping this, we need to be paying attention. So who makes the products? This is how a development team often looks, this is a generous line of saying, well, maybe it's 20% women and 80% men. Most of the teams I've worked on while I was at Microsoft were actually different, and it was more like 90% men and 10% women. So the question I put to some people when I was interviewing them was, so can a developer team that looks like this, 10% women and 90% men, really develop gender-neutral products that are meant to be for half men, half women? Like, can that really happen? And what actually happened was when I asked people this question, men and women, the first thing women said was, yeah, no, of course they can't, like, and they listed a bunch of examples as to where decision-making was different. When I asked the guys, they were like, ah, now you've mentioned it, I don't suppose, like, ah, there must be some problems with this. So it was just interesting even raising it as a talking point. So my fear of the future, if we don't really think this through, is the first robot out there that will be able to sort of be able to do anything of value, will be one that can kind of just shoot a snooker ball and hang out with the guys, which is often like the first scenarios that get developed for technology. So before I go into the development cycle I'm going to show you the differences. I'm just going to point out some differences and you must all be sitting there going, yeah, you know all about gender differences, because after all, you're either a female or a male and you know where you differ. But first of all, let's just look at hands. So when there's a huge amount of measurement data out there, anthropometrics, it's been out there for ages, since like the 50s. So every body part is measured so that when you're designing furniture, technology, tables, buildings, environments, you can use this information to really, hey, know what percentage of the population you're dealing with. The hack one is interesting, partly because it relates to a lot of handheld products, but today I'm a fairly tall female. In fact, I'm sort of like 95th, 99th percentile. So I am really in that tall female category. And hand, this measurement here, I am also in the 90th, this information has been available for ages. So good hardware companies will think this through and look at anthropometrics. So that's a real measurement one. Then our lifestyles are different. Research showing that women like to shop and men buy. And what that is, is men like to have a list, know what they're going to go get, they go into the store, they find the items, they pay for the items and they go. Women kind of know what they want to buy, but they want an experience, they want to go in, they want to look around, they want to like compare choices, they want support and assistance. Same task, different levels of satisfaction with different approaches. Some companies now in the US hardware stores with building supplies and wallpaper paints and tools, they've redesigned themselves because they realize more women now are buying that stuff. And so rather than just rows and rows of like, hey, you need a drill, you need a hammer, you need whatever, they're trying to actually make it more experience-based. Next one, lifestyles are different. Women do twice as much housework as men. And again, this is a US-based study, I don't know what the numbers would be like here. Which consequently means less sleep and less leisure time. And so again, when you're designing products, like this would be fun to do, or this would take the stress out of life, is, well, okay, which gender are you thinking about? How can you really think about both perspectives and the needs of both? And so this is all about just being really open-minded and considering, deliberately considering both perspectives. And then the last one is, this was a study done through MIT, was women worry about different things in when anticipating retirement. So women are worrying about inflation for how much money they have available, longevity, how old will I be, women tend to live a long time, and health, healthcare. In the survey, the thing that men at rated women are about worrying about, will I be bored? Okay, and there's nothing wrong, like obviously nothing wrong. This is the way things are, I'm not gonna try and change it and like force men into worrying about these other things. It's purely, hey, there are differences in lifestyles. Consider it, think it through. Technology use is different. And so is it like Twitter, women actually have saved more in their tweets, men tend to link and point to things. Loggers in the US used to be predominantly female because they just persist and write longer, whereas the top bloggers used to be men and developing those technologies, they always used to think they were male bloggers, but actually it really wasn't that way. Buying power in the US, nearly all the buying power now, is actually with the women. Whether they're actually, like I don't have an understanding in terms of how much is truly, they earn, they pay for, but they influence all the decisions. House, car, health insurance, all the big decisions. So hey, pay attention to businesses. This is what you need to be looking at. So the next thing I was asking about was personal opinion. Again, if we've got these men and women coming to work, 90% men, 10% women, how does your personal opinion come in at work? So most companies like to say, hey, we have these processes. It's not about opinions about data, we really think it's true. It's, we think about customers, we think about the business and the numbers and the money we're making, we think about the technology and that's how we make decisions. Then as we move through the cycle, we're making trade-offs about whether we want to ship the product, the quality, we have processes in place. Hands up, who works with a product team of some kind. Okay, quite a lot of you. Now, how many times do you go to work and somebody's got to make a quick decision? Is it like, it's fairly frequent, right? It's decisions are made constantly. There is a general process, but we make decisions all the time and how we make that decision is based on our gut responses and what we know. So does personal opinion influence that gut decision-making? And when I asked everybody, I talked to people with different job disciplines, different levels, senior and junior, and male and female. And the answer is yes. They bring personal opinion to decision-making. Both men and women. Except the only discipline I could not get to say, yes, they brought opinion, were researchers, market researchers, user researchers. I sat on them and I squeezed them and I'm like, come on, confess, you do, you do. And there was no way of making them crack. They generally try and stay with their data because their credibility is based on representing customer data, user data and numbers. Everybody else, hey, designers in the room, sorry, they confessed, personal opinion came in. So decisions for personal, if you're using it. Personal gain. I really want this feature in the product, please put it in. I really, really need it. And to use the asthma bragging rights, hey, we're gonna beat the competition, we have this, we do this faster, we're better. And opportunity to learn. You know, when you've just learned that new skill and you're looking for a way of applying it, we all do it, you know. So if you put that feature in, I get to use that new HTML5, widget-y thing. And so let's do that. So does gender influence opinion? And the answer is yes. It influences it in a way because women do not like to share feminine opinions. So even though you're putting, you know, the companies are valuing having diversity in the room, it's very hard to get women to really share all their opinions. And the reasons for this is I don't want to raise any opinion that will identify me as a woman in the room. It just, that's a topic that they really often will ask, but they just don't want to be called out as different in some way. So they've sooner not mentioned the things I really like shopping as opposed to like, yeah, you have a list, you buy stuff off it. The second one was, I don't want to suggest any ideas that will be voted down later. Like who wants to put the loser idea out there? And so they don't want to be identified as a woman because they don't want to put the idea out because, you know, I'll be shot down. And the final one is, the sad one sometimes is, when you've worked in a company for a while, it's, I've forgotten I'm a woman. I don't even think to bring those issues into the room. And so, so we need to do something about that to enable this voice because again, companies need that perspective when they're building products. So when they go out of the door at the beginning, they will be successful with men and women. And again, if you're a business, you kind of want that. So let's look at the engineering process because it was like, okay, now I know this. Where does it show up? Where does opinion show up, actually, in this process? And so I went, again, when I'm talking to people, it's like, let's go through the cycle. And this is just a representation. It can be agile, it can be waterfall, it can be sigma. Again, personal opinion comes into all. So one is the concept phase. You've got the brainstorming and voting on ideas. Well, as we heard this morning on the panel, that sometimes when you raise your voice with an idea, it can really be stamped on and sort of pushed out of the way. It's really hard to really open up. So brainstorming is an area that, hey, yeah, it's great, everybody idea on the table and or on the post-it notes on the wall. It doesn't always work that way if it's not a really empowered environment. Another one that is very common for startups and also in corporations is the concept of an idea. You'll go pitch an idea. Now, the people that buy off venture capitalists and investors, and today in the US, they're mostly men. When you're pitching an idea, you try and desperately appeal to them and get them to like you, to like the idea. And you do that by sometimes customizing the prototype you're putting forwards. And so then it can lead to a more male-oriented prototype. This was just an example and I'll go through it quickly because I know I've got to watch time. It was just a prototype, not prototype. It was an early product for a finance product developed by like five guys. When I saw the trailer for the promotion, it's like, oh, a guy coming home from work, rents into a house, kids are screaming, Kettle is steaming over. Next thing, he's really sad because everything's going on and he's got bills to pay. And now he's really worried now, I don't know if this is single debt or they just totally forgot to put the woman in the picture of whether she's coming home, because again in the US, women take care of the finances. And then they look to the categories for making a budget with this product. And the samples were home movies, holiday gifts, gas parking, bars and good times, business food and games. And it's like, okay, you know, I'm not sure whether this is a gender diverse kind of first example product to put out there. Okay, I'm just gonna skip this example, timing. So we've got early development. We look at scorecards, bug counts and feature sets. Those are the formal processes of when you're developing a product, but the chances are personal opinion, live voices and your own priorities are coming into the decision making or people are using their personal data sets to start the code off or they'll start with a scenario to support that they really want. And the question is, how do you get diversity involved in that aspect of decision making? And at the end of the release cycle, we've got lots of examples around bait testing and pre-release, often it's meant to do the early adoption of products, which means the data you're getting back, not just bug fixes, but scenarios and ideas for the next version. It's heavier on male scenarios than getting the feedback from women. So here are some examples of cost nothing improvements for engineering teams. One is always referred to the user as a she. Doesn't matter what product you're developing, whether it's 90 product, developer product, home product is if you start calling the user a she, it will start to make a difference and not end up with a he and it's a me scenario. Exec should always ask for females and prototypes to help get rid of the idea of that they customized for the male audience. Simple one is put gender on any data slides, help understand and be aware. It's all about informed design. Then on small efforts, this one I love to poke teams with is again if it's products good for men and women and they're like, okay, yeah, there should be no differences. It's good for everyone. And then as soon as you say to them, okay, well then if we do any research, it should only be with women. They go, well, no, that can't be right, because so you think there are differences and they're like, well, yeah. So the question is either do research with only women if you're telling me there is no difference because you shouldn't be afraid of that. Or you do something else and I got zero. Okay, screw it, I'm gonna go for an extra minute. We've got brainstorming. Make sure you have more women in the room. Have a women only brainstorming session. I don't know if the answers will be different, but that's how you enable it and then check to see what's the same and what's different. These are ideas. The last one is just think about women as early adopter panels. And the footnote here is I often get this talk to a variety of teams, including engineering teams, and it's hey, really empower your user experience teams, really pay attention to customer-focused design. That's what it really should be about. But in the meantime, when you're making thousands of decisions, make sure you pay attention to gender. So I have a research paper on this, at this URL. So if you want to know more and hear more examples, that's what they are. Okay, there you go, now I respect the zero. Thank you.