The health-technology sector overlooks women and their bodies

On the other hand it would be a big surprise for me if the people that designed the Fitbit's period tracking feature did not include or at least consulted women.

Something else that surprised me is the bit about crash test dummies. I found it difficult to believe that no female dummies existed. A quick search showed that in fact dummies modelling females exist since the 70s. However it seems they were derived from the male dummies. It seems it really took many more years to design a female dummy from the ground up (although I found articles from at least 2006 about it).

That's a great idea that's new to me, and I'm thankful to the author for pointing it out, and I'll suggest we add it. (In the Netherlands where it's flat, parents pedal their kids around in a Bakfiets. [2])

The program's content was mostly designed by a woman [3], so I don't think omitting pram jogging was a sexist decision on her part -- it's more that you can't think of everything, or keep up with every new trend that's happening (and if you try, the menus are way too long so the user interface is difficult to use).

I agree with the article that it's outrageously patronizing and sexist for Fitbit to tell women how soon they must get over their periods!

[1] https://turnaroundhealth.com/

[2] https://www.fresheconomicthinking.com/2010/06/bakfiets-is-au...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_PS3lzlqpg

Maybe they just can’t track it.

I do agree, though, that this is more generally something indicating that diversity in teams working on software all kinds of people use is important. I think a father could just as well have helped out here, because I can’t imagine that you wouldn’t immediately think of pushing the pram as an activity you want to track if you were a parent heavily involved with your child. It’s obvious, really.

I certainly see a lot more women running with prams than men on the trail near me. The majority of childcare is still overwhelmingly handled by women.

> However, is it really a sign of (concious or unconscious) sexism?

This is exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to see in a sexist culture where women are either deterred from entering certain careers/sectors or forced to leave. If you don't have a lot of women around, you probably won't notice as many things that disproportionately affect women.

Never attribute something to maliciousness when laziness can explain the phenomenon equally well.

If we set the bar higher than a minimum of 40% then we are quickly going into single digit percent of the population. There is very few professions with an exact 50/50 ratio.

Thank you for bringing attention to this very important point. From the tweet:

"FWIW this feature was led by women (product manager, head of product, engineering manager). I am not defending the design & I understand that it fails to meet your expectations. Fitbit isn't that big and the people there care a lot about helping people."

A later reply by a current employee: "Also, the algorithm development was led by a woman."

This is just another software flaw, not a demonstration of rampant sexism. I'd ask commenters here (in general, not replying to the parent comment) to curb their outrage. And if things like this really bother you, apply to one of our many open positions.

Well, how long is the longest period that your female family members have had? Is this a thing you discuss with them?

> The implication that the lack of employed female engineers has more to do with anything other than...the lack of female engineers.

You're bothered by the implication that thing have consequences?

> The fact that statistical outliers need to be represented in every application for the general public.

You mean the fact that period trackers need to be able to track periods?

"We're building tax software. Should we get a tax consultant to look it over and identify problems?"

"We're building a programming IDE. Should we get some programmers on our design team? Should we maybe eat our own dog food and have our programmers use it internally for development?"

"We're building a screen reader. Should our QA team have some blind testers on it?"

"We're building a product that we're marketing to women. Should women be involved in building it?"

Sure you can get around these issues by doing extra market research, but in basically every other area of development we understand that it is an asset to have your designers and builders be intimately familiar with the problems you're trying to solve. The cheapest, most efficient way to make your design team intimately familiar with problems that women face is to hire women.

It's no different than hiring security experts if you're building serverside software - you want some people on your team to be an early voice of reason; to be able to raise their hand early in a code review or a tech demo and say, "Hey, just so you know that's an XSS attack vector," or, "Hey, just so you know I've actually had periods that last longer than 10 days."

I would instead blame it on the people specifying the product features for not knowing their market ( and that usually is someone like a product owner).

Note that i clearly agree that having more people inside the company actually representing the target audience is a plus, but that's just a general rule, it doesn't apply specifically to having more women in tech team ( which i think is a nice idea, if only because tech is an interesting field to work in and women shouldn't miss this opportunity)

I guess Fitbit’s next step should be to recruit female testers to avoid Twitter mobs.