Gender bias in app design : Of personas and sabre-toothed tigers

We recently published a blog article on the topic of personas published and what they are useful for. As useful as it is to create personas and use them for the development process, there is also a great danger of falling into the cliché trap and reinforcing unconscious stereotypes. As developers and UX designers, it is our job to keep an eye on this – because we are in a position to not only avoid stereotypes, but to break them down in the long term.

Imagine the following scene: “The doctor gives the patient the medication.” In the majority of cases, the doctor we imagine in this situation is a man. Just as the nurse tends to be read as female. A construction worker is male and broad-shouldered and the mother is guaranteed to be responsible for childcare. Our thinking is shaped by stereotypes and most of the time we are not even aware of them. Nevertheless, they influence our decisions and actions on a daily basis.

Our brain likes to conserve energy – this is what used to ensure our survival in the wild. Even now, our brain still functions in exactly the same way as it did when we had to flee from sabre-toothed tigers. This means that we compartmentalize. Quickly. Because it makes our everyday lives easier. And everything that has been memorized is difficult to “get rid of”. Precisely because it requires energy that our brain actually wanted to save.

The fact that we already compartmentalize and retrieve information before the image of our counterpart reaches our cognitive awareness is exciting. We stereotype within milliseconds. But even when we have time to think (because it’s highly unlikely that a sabre-toothed tiger will jump out of the bushes), we tend to think in pigeonholes. And this is precisely where the danger lies when we develop personas for a project.

The first mistake is to fall into extremes. “This is the classic rookie mistake when creating the characteristics of a persona,” says Maria Timonen, our UX specialist. So we don’t just define a housewife with a child and a hobby of reading, we go all-in. The 40-year-old housewife has three children, is constantly overworked, has no hobbies due to a lack of time, drinks wine once a week in the women’s group and often argues with her husband because she feels underappreciated. So we dig deep into the cliché box of a character in order to paint as drastic (and, in our assumption, clear) a picture as possible. The better we can categorize, the happier our brain is, one would think.

The principal is male, the kindergarten teacher is female. The lawyer is a man and the secretary is a woman. This division is long outdated and yet we still fall into this pattern. “With personas, I can not only break down stereotypes, but in the worst case strengthen them”. Because developers use personas to try to better empathize with users, we reinforce existing thought patterns. In other words, we are cementing the stereotypes even further. The good news is that these stereotypes are easy to break down if you are aware of them.

Personas offer an opportunity to communicate better with users. It provides an emotional connection, promotes the ability to empathize with the respective person and understand their needs. As designers and developers, we therefore have a responsibility to put on the brakes and take countermeasures if we fall too far into stereotypes.

Of course, we must not compare stereotypes with statistics. It may well make sense to assume that the majority of construction workers are male – this can be proven statistically. There’s no need to force gender stereotypes and send 27-year-old Lana to the construction site. But in the vast majority of cases, gender is absolutely irrelevant and, in the worst case, only encourages people to fall into the cliché trap.

The second mistake that Maria says is often made is to focus on age, gender and profession when creating a persona. All three are “hard” factors that may have no influence on the persona, but contribute to recalling certain stereotypes in our subconscious.

A good persona that is useful for the development process is not defined by a specific age, profession or gender, but by their values, goals and needs in life as well as their challenges or “pain points”. If we define these “soft” factors first, we can choose the rest of the persona at random, give it a face, a name, an age and, if necessary, a gender. This creates proximity to the user with the relevant aspects without our brain already opening a drawer when choosing a name.

Diversity therefore not only applies in everyday life, but also in the development of our fictitious user group. Of course, we cannot completely solve the problem of gender bias and we certainly fall into the trap of our energy-saving brain here and there. But we have the opportunity to set the course by trying to consciously steer in other directions. The easiest way to do this is by creating personas:

1. Start with the “soft” factors such as values, goals, challenges and pain points
2. try to work in a gender-neutral way as a first step
3. Consciously play with our clichés and turn them around. This means taking a step back and reflecting on our own stereotypes

In this way, we not only actively combat stereotypes, but also ensure that we cover our target group as precisely as possible and that there are no blind spots.