Google announced in early 2020 that it has more than 2,000 employees across the company who contribute to product inclusion and diversity.
The team of “inclusion supporters” was created to take gender, age, race and disability into account when designing products.
But it all started with Google’s ubiquitous “20% rule” at one point. The 20% rule says that employees are allowed to spend 20% of their time doing something other than their regular work.
The “20% rule” is one of the defining elements of Google as an organization.
Annie Jean-Baptiste, who leads the product inclusion team, explains how the team was created in her book Building For Everyone.
Baptiste’s book describes a group of Googlers’ deliberation process on how to bring more of an “inclusion” perspective into the product development process.
“Some employees, myself included, thought that topics like diversity and inclusion would make for an interesting 20% project. was never discussed in the context of
However, the moment came when things changed dramatically. An engineer named Peter Sherman contacted Baptiste’s team.
Sherman was responsible for the proximity sensor in the camera of Google’s Pixel smartphone. In Baptiste’s writings, he gives the following ramblings.
“Both the camera and the sensor had to work for everyone, regardless of skin tone. I was having a hard time figuring out how to secure the
Involved in any Google product
The issue came to the fore when Baptiste brought up Sherman’s woes in 2015 at the Diversity Summit, a conference sponsored by Google. Sherman recalls:
“Many of the employees who attended the summit spoke of their dissatisfaction with images that had skin tones adjusted. However, biases that once existed in the development of color photography[editor’snote:KodakforexampleUntilthe1980sCaucasianskintoneswereusedasanindexforcoloradjustmentwhendevelopingin-housefilms]and that camera usability can be improved by keeping inclusion in mind when developing cameras. I didn’t.”
Baptiste writes, “Early discussions with various project teams sparked a lot of ideas and sparked a fire in our team.”
This movement evolved over time, eventually resulting in a product inclusion team involved in all of Google’s products.
The Project Inclusion team also helped develop Google’s Daydream VR headset.
One example Baptiste points to is the Daydream VR headset. The development process involving the Project Inclusion team took into account not only head size and the presence or absence of glasses, but also factors such as gender and hair texture.
she writes: “We realized that the idea of cross-border inclusion would have a huge impact on our products, so we set out to explore that, and the 20% team eventually grew into what is known as the Product Inclusion Team.”
*This article first appeared on September 3, 2020.
[original text]
(Translated by Hiroko Tamaki, edited by Ayuko Tokiwa)
Source: BusinessInsider
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