Garen Checkley
Design research and strategy for Next Billion Users
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The Internet is more affordable and accessible than ever before, but it is not gender equitable. Our report,“Toward Gender Equity Online,” highlights key actions to further the conversation toward a more equitable Internet. In this report, we present global research insights on the experiences of the next billion women online. Our research spans seven countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Pakistan. Our methodology involves interviews with 363 participants and surveys with 3,618 participants. Our respondents include people across the gender spectrum, including cisgender women and transgender women. We identify four core challenges to gender equity online: Access, Content & Community, Privacy, and Safety. We then offer recommendations for technology creators and the public to address these challenges, such as gathering metrics to understand gender gaps, conducting gender-focused research, and analyzing existing data with a gender lens.
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“Privacy is not for me, it’s for those rich women”: Performative Privacy Practices on Mobile Phones by Women in South Asia
Amna Batool
David Nemer
Nithya Sambasivan
Nova Ahmed
Sane Gaytán
Tara Matthews
Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2018 (2018)
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Women in South Asia own fewer personal devices like laptops and phones than women elsewhere in the world. Further, cultural expectations influence how mobile phones are shared with and digital activities are scrutinized by family members. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study conducted in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh about how women perceive, manage, and control their personal privacy on shared phones. We describe a set of five performative practices our participants employed to maintain individuality and privacy, despite frequent borrowing and monitoring of their devices by family and social relations. These practices involved management of phone and app locks, content deletion, technology avoidance, and use of private modes. We present design opportunities for maintaining privacy on shared devices that are mindful of the social norms and values in the South Asian countries studied, including to improve discovery of privacy controls, offer content hiding, and provide algorithmic understanding of multiple-user use cases. Our suggestions have implications for enhancing the agency of user populations whose social norms shape their phone use.
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A framework for technology design for emerging markets
Nithya Sambasivan
Nibha Jain
Asif Baki
Taylor Herr
ACM, 2 Penn Plaza, Suite 701
New York, NY 10121-0701 (2017) (to appear)
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A billion new people are expected to come online in the next couple of years--almost entirely from emerging markets. A majority of these new users are coming online through a mobile phone. Decreased costs of production of smartphones, shifting localities for labour, rollout of Internet pipes, and aspirational desires have led to rapid growth and uptake of the Internet in emerging markets.
Today, Internet software can be made available to millions across the world instantly. Technologies, though, enter heterogenous cultural, social and economic milieus in their traversals. The HCI community can play a critical role in bringing insights on practices, values, and infrastructures in these contexts to the design process.
In this article, we share the process of creation and dissemination of a research-led framework for design for emerging markets at Google and externally. In the second half, we discuss the framework, principles and implementation.
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