Almost certainly, it was. When Zeynep Tufekci, a researcher at the University of North Carolina, was trying to document tear-gas use in the Gezi Park protests in Turkey in 2013, the size of her Google Nexus got in the way.11 It was the evening of 9 June. Gezi Park was crowded. Parents were there with their children. And then the canisters were fired. Because officials ‘often claimed that tear gas was used only on vandals and violent protesters’, Tufekci wanted to document what was happening. So she pulled out her phone. ‘And as my lungs, eyes and nose burned with the pain of the lachrymatory agent released from multiple capsules that had fallen around me, I started cursing.’ Her phone was too big. She could not take a picture one-handed – ‘something I had seen countless men with larger hands do all the time’. All Tufekci’s photos from the event were unusable, she wrote, and ‘for one simple reason: good smartphones are designed for male hands’.
Like the standard keyboard, smartphones designed for male hands also may be affecting women’s health. It is a relatively new field of study, but the research that does exist on the health impact of smartphones is not positive.12 But although women’s hand size is demonstrably smaller than men’s, and although women have been found to have a higher prevalence of musculoskeletal symptoms and disorders,13 research into the impact of large smartphones on hands and arms does not buck the gender data gap trend. In the studies I found, women were significantly under-represented as subjects,14 and the vast majority of studies did not sex-disaggregate their data15 – including those that did manage to adequately represent women.16 This is unfortunate because the few that did sex-disaggregate their data reported a statistically significant gender difference in the impact of phone size on women’s hand and arm health.17
The answer to the problem of smartphones that are too big for women’s hands seems obvious: design smaller handsets. And there are of course some smaller handsets on the market, notably Apple’s iPhone SE. But the SE wasn’t updated for two years and so was an inferior product to the standard iPhone range (which offers only huge or huger as size options). And it’s now been discontinued anyway. In China, women and men with smaller hands can buy the Keecoo K1 which, with its hexagonal design, is trying to account for women’s hand size: good.18 But it has less processing power and comes with in-built air-brushing: bad. Very bad.
Voice recognition has also been suggested as a solution to smartphone-associated RSI,19 but this actually isn’t much of a solution for women, because voice-recognition software is often hopelessly male-biased. In 2016, Rachael Tatman, a research fellow in linguistics at the University of Washington, found that Google’s speech-recognition software was 70% more likely to accurately recognise male speech than female speech20 – and it’s currently the best on the market.21
Clearly, it is unfair for women to pay the same price as men for products that deliver an inferior service to them. But there can also be serious safety implications. Voice-recognition software in cars, for example, is meant to decrease distractions and make driving safer. But they can have the opposite effect if they don’t work – and often, they don’t work, at least for women. An article on car website Autoblog quoted a woman who had bought a 2012 Ford Focus, only to find that its voice-command system only listened to her husband, even though he was in the passenger seat.22 Another woman called the manufacturer for help when her Buick’s voice-activated phone system wouldn’t listen to her: ‘The guy told me point-blank it wasn’t ever going to work for me. They told me to get a man to set it up.’ Immediately after writing these pages I was with my mother in her Volvo Cross-Country watching her try and fail to get the voice-recognition system to call her sister. After five failed attempts I suggested she tried lowering the pitch of her voice. It worked first time.
As voice-recognition software has become more sophisticated, its use has branched out to numerous fields, including medicine, where errors can be just as grave. A 2016 paper analysed a random sample of a hundred notes dictated by attending emergency physicians using speech-recognition software, and found that 15% of the errors were critical, ‘potentially leading to miscommunication that could affect patient care’.23 Unfortunately these authors did not sex-disaggregate their data, but papers that have, report significantly higher transcription error rates for women than men.24 Dr Syed Ali, the lead author of one of the medical dictation studies, observed that his study’s ‘immediate impact’ was that women ‘may have to work somewhat harder’ than men ‘to make the [voice recognition] system successful’.25 Rachael Tatman agrees: ‘The fact that men enjoy better performance than women with these technologies means that it’s harder for women to do their jobs. Even if it only takes a second to correct an error, those seconds add up over the days and weeks to a major time sink, time your male colleagues aren’t wasting messing with technology.’
Thankfully for frustrated women around the world, Tom Schalk, the vice president of voice technology at car navigation system supplier ATX, has come up with a novel solution to fix the ‘many issues with women’s voices’.26 What women need, he said, was ‘lengthy training’ – if only women ‘were willing’ to submit to it. Which, sighs Schalk, they just aren’t. Just like the wilful women buying the wrong stoves in Bangladesh, women buying cars are unreasonably expecting voice-recognition software developers to design a product that works for them when it’s obvious that the problem needing fixing is the women themselves. Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Rachael Tatman rubbishes the suggestion that the problem lies in women’s voices rather than the technology that doesn’t recognise them: studies have found that women have ‘significantly higher speech intelligibility’,27 perhaps because women tend to produce longer vowel sounds28 and tend to speak slightly more slowly than men.29 Meanwhile, men have ‘higher rates of disfluency, produce words with slightly shorter durations, and use more alternate (‘sloppy’) pronunciations’.30 With all this in mind, voice-recognition technology should, if anything, find it easier to recognise female rather than male voices – and indeed, Tatman writes that she has ‘trained classifiers on speech data from women and they worked just fine, thank you very much’.
Of course, the problem isn’t women’s voices. It’s our old friend, the gender data gap. speech-recognition technology is trained on large databases of voice recordings, called corpora. And these corpora are dominated by recordings of male voices. As far as we can tell, anyway: most don’t provide a sex breakdown on the voices contained in their corpus, which in itself is a data gap of course.31 When Tatman looked into the sex ratio of speech corpora only TIMIT (‘the single most popular speech corpus in the Linguistic Data Consortium’) provided data broken down by sex. It was 69% male. But contrary to what these findings imply, it is in fact possible to find recordings of women speaking: according to the data on its website, the British National Corpus (BNC)32 is sex-balanced.33