"...The Monk Skin Tone scale is named after Ellis Monk, a Harvard University sociologist who has spent decades researching colorism’s impact on the lives of Black people in the United States. Monk created the scale in 2019 and worked with Google engineers and researchers to incorporate it into the company’s product development. “The reality is that life chances, opportunities, all these things are very much tied to your phenotypical makeup,” Monk said in prepared remarks in a video shown at I/O. “We can weed out these biases in our technology from a really early stage and make sure the technology we have works equally well across all skin tones. I think this is a huge step forward.” (Wired, 11 May 22)