20th Anniversary celebration with activists and advocates Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Cindy Gallop, Sonya Passi, and Dr. Joy Buolamwini

What It Covers

Design Matters celebrates its twentieth anniversary with excerpts from interviews with five activists: Gloria Steinem, Anita Hill, Cindy Gallop, Sonya Passi, and Joy Buolamwini, exploring their work addressing gender violence, sexual harassment, and algorithmic bias.

Key Questions Answered

• •Breaking silence on abuse: Sexual violence perpetrators rely on victims' shame and embarrassment to ensure silence. Normalizing conversations about sex and consent from childhood prevents abuse by removing the stigma that keeps victims from speaking up and holding perpetrators accountable.
• •Economic dimensions of domestic violence: Gender-based violence creates devastating economic consequences including homelessness, destroyed credit scores from fraudulent debt, stolen bank accounts, and forced signing of documents removing financial autonomy. Women lose custody of children years after leaving abuse due to economic instability.
• •AI facial recognition bias: Joy Buolamwini's Gender Shades research revealed Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon facial recognition systems achieved 100% accuracy on white male faces but near coin-flip results for dark-skinned women, with IBM showing 34% error rate difference between best and worst performing demographic groups.
• •Pornography versus sex education: Society's refusal to discuss sex openly makes pornography the default sex educator. The real issue is not pornography itself but the absence of honest dialogue about consent, boundaries, and good sexual values including empathy, sensitivity, generosity, and accountability in intimate relationships.