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How do you make sure to have gender unbiased data for your product?

I am reading "Invisible Women" by Caroline Criado Perez (can't recommend it enough!) when I crossed the chapter in which she discusses how the iPhones got bigger and bigger to the point that women can't hold them with one hand anymore. In the book there is also some evidence that women actually drive the iPhone sales.

The chapter made me wonder how can it be that a company such as Apple can diverge from what their customers want so much. In the same chapter she also discusses how voice recognition works better for men, and how come that women pay the same price for a product that objectively delivers less value.

So, I started wondering, when you are designing your product, how do you make sure you are not starting from biased data? What steps do you follow in order to understand and validate what your customers want and the product/market fit?*

*: The book has other examples regarding stoves, engineered seeds, etc. all examples of very poor customer research, and all because of fundamental gender-biases.

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    I would love to hear some suggestions for this, but my guess is to have more women on product teams. We're all blind to things, the more diversity there is the better. So of course this also applies to other people who are not 'white men' too.

    This also reminds me of the racist soap dispenser: https://www.iflscience.com/technology/this-racist-soap-dispenser-reveals-why-diversity-in-tech-is-muchneeded/

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