I am working on a little side project for a friend of mine who has asked me to collaborate in developing a persona or two for designing a solution to a serious problem. I am not going to go into what that problem is. My friend and I have both have done a lot of research in the domain, and feel confident that we can come up with a persona that will be representative and serve the end goals.
I had finished an initial draft of a persona profile, and started the endless search for photos to go with the persona to bring her to life—her mood board, and day in the life stuff. I wanted to show her family, and wanted her family to be interracial, not because it matters all that much with respect to the problem, but because “we white people” often default to white people pictures in our work, because that is what we have, it is what we know, and it is what is easy. It is precisely because it doesn’t apparently matter that it does!
I wanted a picture of a mom, a dad, and two teen-aged kids. First I searched for families. Lots of great pictures of different kinds of families popped up:
I quickly became frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t find any pictures of families with teen-aged children, even after I modified my search to include them. I think this speaks to how much our culture dislikes adolescents. We are biased against teenagers, favoring images of families with young, cute little children. How sad. No wonder adolescents feel so disenfranchised; they are! I gave up on that and thought I would go look for individual family members. I began looking for a mother.
I typically used Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. I entered, “stock photo middle aged woman,” very generic, thinking that I would get a mix of images of white people and people of color. This is what I got:
A lot of white women, even “below the fold.” I went to Google. Same result:
I went to Bing:
Holy smokes! I had no idea that there were so few women of color in their middle years. I searched on “middle aged men,” and ended up with the same white result.
What should we conclude from this? I guess white people are the only people who get to middle age?
I searched on “good-looking men.” All white. Then, “good-looking women.” All white. Who knew?
I told my husband about my discovery, and he suggested that I add “Gen Z” in my search for pictures of interracial families and teens. Darn it, if that didn’t do the trick! I found my family, finally.
I am not sure what to make of all this. I believe this is big data at its worst. Our algorithms are biasing us; they reinforce our bad beliefs, and encourage us to live inside our bubbles. Whatever is going on, it is NOT good. What do you think?
