pssst those two things are connected
> Discrimination happens against an individual.
This is just weirdly wrong?
> If you see discrimination happen against an individual, and you privately and discreetly address it with the appropriate people (could be with those directly involved, with superiors, with HR, whatever seems appropriate in that situation), that is not a political act
This is an incredibly political act.
There is no connection whatsoever between diversity and building product. Note: you haven't tried to explain your claim there is, just implied it's obvious, probably because you can't. I've seen people try to honestly intellectually defend a connection between employee diversity and product design before, and it's always a joke. You get anecdotes about face recognition not working on black people (reality: the software in question just had trouble with low contrast images and also struggled with white people's faces). And that's about it. I can't recall ever seeing someone actually argue that more women == better product because, well, that's a pretty sexist thing to believe isn't it? It implies men have no empathy, or that there's a universe of product requirements women will only tell to other women, etc.
If discrimination is happening against an individual and you work with the management chain to resolve it, that's not a political act, because you aren't attempting to radically remake the entire organisation for everyone (politics), but only address the specific problem that was actually observed.
Want examples beyond hand driers? Apple missed menstrual cycle tracking in the Health app. NASA offered to send 1,000 tampons with the first woman in space - and had to abandon its first all-woman spacewalk for bad planning in kit availability. Google Photos tagged black people as gorillas. (Regardless of the cause, it shipped). SnapChat shipped a yellowface filter. Google Translate delivers highly gendered results when translating from gendered languages into English. Google Home is 70% more likely to recognise male voices because of training set bias. Women are 49% more likely to be injured in car accidents because the seating position for crash testing is designed for men. And - yes! - Pinterest has struggled to reach men as users apparently because of its SEO strategy.
Want more examples? Ask any passing woman what app she uses that clearly didn’t think about women.
Diverse teams make better products. The stats are out there.
Trying to argue this highly political. We wouldn’t even be able to talk about your point at Basecamp. Does that not worry you? Don’t assume they will always agree with your politics just because they’ve done this.
The examples you give are mostly product examples (i.e. the product lacking features or not correctly addressing its target audience). Therefore I think it would be appropriate to discuss those in the workplace, but NOT as a function of e.g. the gender make-up or racial make-up of the team, but rather as a function of competence in addressing those issues.
In particular, imagine a hypothetical scenario where we are building a product, and we receive the feedback that many women find it difficult to use, and we want to fix that by hiring an expert.
The goal is to hire someone who understands marketing this type of product to women. Although it's maybe likely the most suitable candidate for this would be a woman, it could also possibly be someone else - and we would be looking for experience/evidence toward competence in that area, regardless of the candidate's gender or other characteristics.
To make the conversation apolitical, it would be about specific competencies and lacks of the team or product, NOT about the team itself having "not enough short blue-eyed Turkish women over 50" or some other group.
Also, to keep the conversation apolitical, the conversation would not extend to broader social questions outside of the specific product or problem. It would not stray into generalizations about groups. It would not appeal to emotional arguments like "safety."
> Women are more likely than men to suffer adverse side effects of medications because drug dosages have historically been based on clinical trials conducted on men, suggests new research from the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago.
There's some serious assumptions buried there that don't pass the smell test.
