Women’s Equality Day was created to mark unfinished work, not a finished win. Here’s what that means for the courts, agencies, and portals we build.
August 26 marks Women’s Equality Day. The date commemorates the moment in 1920 when Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby certified the 19th Amendment — the paperwork moment, eight days after Tennessee became the thirty-sixth state to ratify, by a single vote.
Here’s the part that gets left out of most observances: when Representative Bella Abzug pushed Congress to designate the day, she didn’t intend it purely as a celebration. She meant it to draw attention to how much was still unfinished. Her first resolution failed in 1971. The one that passed, in 1973, arrived in the middle of the fight over the Equal Rights Amendment — a fight that was, by definition, an argument that the existing guarantees weren’t enough.
So the day was built, from the start, around a distinction worth holding onto: the difference between having a right and having access to it.
That distinction is our entire job.
A right on paper is not a right in practice
The 19th Amendment prohibited denying the vote on the basis of sex. It did not dismantle the machinery already in place to keep people from the ballot. Black women across the South still faced poll taxes, literacy tests, and intimidation for another forty-five years. Native American women weren’t uniformly citizens until 1924, and some states blocked them from voting well after that. Many Asian American women were barred from naturalization, and therefore from voting, until mid-century.
The legal right arrived in 1920. The access arrived unevenly, decades later, for millions of people — and only because someone did the specific, unglamorous work of removing the specific, unglamorous barriers.
That’s a history lesson. It’s also a product spec.
The modern version of that gap runs through a login screen
Public-sector technology exists to serve everyone an agency is responsible to — not the median user, not the easiest user to design for. A court’s e-filing portal, an agency’s benefits application, a licensing renewal system: these aren’t consumer products where a frustrated user goes to a competitor. There is no competitor. If the system fails someone, they aren’t served. They just miss the deadline.
Which means a service can be fully available in the legal sense and functionally out of reach in the practical one. The right is there. The access isn’t. Same gap, new century.
And it usually isn’t malice or even neglect. It’s a series of reasonable-looking decisions, each made by someone picturing a user who resembles themselves.
Where this gets concrete
It’s tempting to keep equity at the level of principle. The useful version is much smaller and much more specific. A few examples from the kind of systems we work on:
Names that change. Women change names far more often than men do — marriage, divorce, remarriage — and public records don’t update in lockstep. A system that requires an exact match across a driver’s license, a filing from 2014, and a current benefits record will lock someone out of their own case. A system that supports aliases, prior names, and human-reviewed matching will not. This is a database design decision that becomes an access decision.
Addresses that need protecting. Nearly every state runs an address confidentiality program for survivors of domestic violence and stalking. If a portal displays a party’s address by default, autocompletes it, or exposes it in a downloadable record, the design has created a safety problem that no amount of policy language undoes. Confidentiality has to be a first-class feature in the data model, not a checkbox bolted on before launch.
Time and device. Someone doing this at 11pm after a caregiving shift, on a phone, on a shared library computer with a session limit, is not an edge case — she’s a substantial share of the actual user base. A form that can’t save progress, times out silently, or requires a desktop-only plugin has quietly selected for people with uninterrupted time and their own hardware.
Language and fluency. Portals often assume comfort with legal and bureaucratic vocabulary. When the instructions require you to already know what a “respondent” is or which of four forms applies to you, the system is testing for institutional familiarity and calling it a user error. Plain language isn’t dumbing down. It’s removing a barrier that was never intentional and never necessary.
None of these are theoretical. Each is a specific decision made by a specific person on a specific sprint — and each one either widens access or narrows it.
The uncomfortable part
A system built only around the people who are easiest to design for is, by definition, not equal. It just hasn’t been tested against everyone else yet.
That’s the sentence worth sitting with, because it reframes the question. The problem usually isn’t that a team decided to exclude anyone. It’s that the testing pool, the research participants, the people in the room during requirements — all skewed toward one kind of user, and nobody noticed the skew because the system worked fine for everyone who tried it.
Equity by design means building systems that don’t require someone to already have privilege, comfort, or fluency in order to be served well. In practice that means recruiting research participants who look like the actual constituency rather than the ones easiest to schedule. It means treating the hardest user journey as the real one. It means asking, on every requirement, who this quietly assumes.
It’s slower than designing for a default user. We won’t pretend otherwise. But it’s the work that actually matches the mission most public agencies exist to serve — and it’s considerably cheaper than discovering the gap after launch, in a complaint or a lawsuit or a local news story about the people the system left behind.
Why we keep coming back to this
We build technology for courts, agencies, and associations. The through-line in that work is that our users mostly aren’t choosing to be there. They’re filing because they have to, applying because they need to, renewing because the law says so. When you serve a captive audience, the ethical bar is higher, not lower.
Women’s Equality Day is a reminder that equal access has never been the default state of anything. It has always been built — deliberately, incrementally, by people who decided the status quo wasn’t good enough and then did the specific work of fixing specific barriers.
That was true in 1920, and in 1965, and in 1973. It’s true on a much smaller scale every time a team sits down to design a public-facing system and asks who this actually works for.
We’d love to be your technology partners. If you’re rethinking a public-facing portal, a case management system, or a service that has to work for everyone, let’s talk.
Let’s turn your idea into a product. — azularc.com