CONCEPT
The Coded Gaze
Joy Buolamwini’s term for the partiality embedded in machine-perception systems—not the product of malicious intent but of homogeneous builders who treated their own partial sample of humanity as the universal default.
The coded gaze is a theory of how bias enters technical systems, and it borrows deliberately from a longer intellectual tradition about who gets to look and who is looked at. To speak of a gaze is to insist that perception carries a perspective—that the act of seeing is also an act of judging, and that
systems built to perceive the world will encode the judgments of their makers whether or not anyone intended them to. The concept’s force comes from its insistence that the bias is structural rather than incidental: the coded gaze does not require a bigoted author, only a homogeneous one. A team that draws on its own experience to decide what to build and how to test it unconsciously treats its own kind as the default human, and the system that results works beautifully for people like its makers and poorly for everyone else—without anyone in the room having meant any harm. This reframing matters because it changes what a