Microsoft Research Gender Diversity Lecture Series 4: Diversity Driving Innovation Moving from Research to Action

This interactive session will explain how researchers can take gender into account when designing systems and products. People have focused on increasing women’s participation in engineering and technology for several decades. But what if we go a step further and look at the benefits of diversity for research and product development? Research blind to gender can fail. When a well-known company developed Translate, no one noticed that the program defaults inappropriately to the masculine pronoun. Articles about Londa Schiebinger, for example, default to “he said,” “he thinks,” occasionally, “it wrote.” This default is unconscious. The question is: how can gender analysis improve research and product design? In this interactive session, we will develop some examples. Gender analysis adds value to research by sparking creativity and ensuring excellence in outcomes; it adds value to business by making products responsive to the broad user groups. Can we afford to ignore such opportunities? You will leave this session with tools and solutions you can bring back and implement on your projects.

Introduction by Lili Cheng

Speaker Details

Lili Cheng is General Manager of the Future Social Experiences (FUSE) Labs in Microsoft Research, FUSE. The focus of FUSE Labs is to work in partnership with product and research teams to ideate, develop, and deliver new social, real-time, and media-rich experiences for home and work. FUSE Labs experiences give users new ways to create, connect and collaborate with the people, information and ideas that matter to them.

Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science in the History Department at Stanford University, and joined Stanford’s Clayman Institute for Gender Research in April of 2004 as the Barbara D. Finberg Director.

Professor Schiebinger’s research has been featured in the New York Times, the New Yorker, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitschrift, La Vanguardia, at the London Museum of Natural History, on NPR, and elsewhere. She speaks and consults nationally and internationally on issues surrounding women and gender in science, medicine, and engineering.

Date:
Speakers:
Lili Cheng and Londa Schiebinger
Affiliation:
FUSE Labs, Microsoft Research Redmond, Clayman Institute at Stanford

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running

    • Portrait of Lili Cheng

      Lili Cheng

      Corporate Vice President and Distinguished Engineer