artificial intelligence Archives

It feels that Artificial intelligence (AI) has really gone from feeling opaque and slightly in the realms of science fiction to current reality with Chat GPT now partly academically approved and AI of all types – from Bing’s chat GPT ‘wanting to be alive’ Jungesque aspirations this week to Elon Musk’s perhaps legitimate fear of AI to the ‘metaverse’ – being discussed at family gatherings. Surprisingly, or perhaps right on time, the UN Women 67th Annual Commission on the Status of Women International Women’s Day 2023 has a theme of “DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.” With the hashtag #Poweron, the focus is on the opportunities that technology has to create access to work opportunities and services for more parity for women across the world, while reducing the internet’s facilitation and spread of sexual violence.

AI Issues From a Career Perspective for Women

Algorithms and AI can add another layer to bias and stereotyping beyond the human aspects that we all work so hard to defuse. Just under 80% of people who work in AI are men and the systems are entrenched in language – benign at best, purposely coded at worst with “lesser than” logic patterns. AI has been found to have biases against women and from a career perspective this has been understood most in hiring processes with Amazon scrapping their AI for recruiting for some of these reasons. Machine learning has shown to replicate male and white visibility with higher values given to data and images of white men. In The MIT Sloan Review, invisibility and erasure was discussed when it comes to ethnic diversity in facial recognition, with the topic causing a furor last June when President Obama’s face was machine refined as a high pixel image of a white man.

There are huge opportunities in AI though from a career breadth and depth perspective. AI is and will be in our lives more and more with wearables being the predicted game changer for healthcare. Other industries like financial services and even your digital shopping cart are heavily investing in AI and machine learning. It could it be applied to big issues like carbon farming practices and climate disaster and climate migrant preparation related challenges. And job roles and skillsets that represent a cross-section of disciplines are increasingly relevant and necessary, so coming from a STEM background is not a prerequisite for getting involved.

What are the Social Issues?

The issue behind technology is always based in human behaviors from who creates what, how and why, to who uses the product or service and for what end. How much humanity is in avatars and online commenters and how people behave online versus in real life has been a decade plus study. Do people act differently when they have anonymity or are without nonverbal cues? How does life online inform real life and vice versa? Apparently, moral outrage gets reposted 20% more than regular statements. The Pew Center has a body of research stating online harassment to be around 45% for men especially around topics of politics while fewer women report this. But, female politicians face verbal abuse with 39% of tweets about females in politics containing problematic threats, as do female journalists. Women are more likely to be sexually harassed or threatened with sexual violence online with image sharing, revenge porn and sextortion being part of this century so far.

Legislation is slowly catching up in Europe and the US with The White House launching the White House Task Force to Address Online Harassment and Abuse in 2022 to tackle online issues including sexual violence, abuse and sharing of files against women, and also child sexual abuse material (CSAM) sharing. Files containing CSAM have increased exponentially with 89.1 million files being reported in 2021 alone and the Legal 500 recently published a study entitled “Is it time to age gate the internet?” citing demand by internet to view child abuse to be increasing significantly. Harrowing as this is to report the hundreds of percent increase for demand of this terrible societal scourge, it is entirely important to understand how technology can help solve for issues as well as replicate problems. It does require people to think about hard things, have difficult conversations and take actions – such as code and AI for good not evil. For example, Thorn.org works to help via code to tag material to stop the spread of files, and in the UK and EU, there are similar technologies that all companies can access. We all need to work to solve real issues that degrade people as well as for democracy and opportunity for all humans.

Women’s lives is an increasing issue with discussions at major platforms and within governments ongoing on how to truly parse and filter empowering content regarding fitness, breastfeeding and women’s health from adult consensual content from non-consensual violence and assault; first to third world. Society at large from a behavioral perspective is again acceptably and overtly anti- women when it comes to dignity and personal sovereignty it seems. From dating apps and their unsolicited genital pictures and deepfakes to permanent perennial abuse images that never let the victim truly recover and all that is in between, it is hard to avoid pondering the nuances of the internet being a mirror or a vehicle to human darkness?

What Can You Do To Be Part of the Solution?

#1 Support with time and money STEM and coding programs for girls and women such as Girls Who Code or Black Girls Code or anitab.org or NCWIT or TCGi Foundation from Avis Yates Rivers. Encourage any girl or young woman you know to get into STEM. There are many pathways.

#2 Hire women into tech jobs, mentor women where you can, be the sponsor where you can!

#3 Have difficult and unsavory conversations with your kids about what is ok and what is not, and what to do if they see something awful on the internet.

#4 Continue the obviously much needed socio-cultural and psychological work for all humans to instill ethical boundaries in our boys and men (and girls and women) to help stop casual sexual and physical violence in real life as well as virtual world, the mantra ‘boys will be boys’ has to stop now so that girls can be girls, safely.

#5 Fund the solutions. Consider donating to Thorn or a similar organization that provides technical solutions, advocacy, support or education on the topic of CSAM or gender/sexual violence and sex trafficking such as RAINN or New Life, New Friends.

Either way, having awareness that there is a virtual world that replicates some of the real world’s most difficult challenges regarding gender is the conversational entry point into an inevitable new world. With more women being involved in building technology, and more women worldwide having equal access to technology, we hold out hope that we engineer AI for the good of women’s lives and towards the collective good.

By Nicki Gilmour

Bringing more women into artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t just about gender equality. The science of AI offers the opportunity to make data more human, positively impacting nearly every aspect of our lives. Since artificial intelligence uses technology to mimic human decision-making, it is a field that requires a diversity in perspectives from the people who develop it, and yet the gender gap in AI companies limits the innovation and integrity of the products they create. If the data fed into AI algorithms contain bias, their outcomes will as well.

Research from Gartner predicts that in 2022, 85% of AI projects will deliver “erroneous outcomes owing to bias in data, algorithms or the teams responsible for managing them.” To prevent AI from furthering discrimination, we need to start by looking at the man – and the woman – in the mirror, and ensure that those creating and developing AI technology represent a spectrum of society at large.

Supporting Female Talent to Grow and Thrive

This doesn’t mean that creating a representative workplace is easy. Getting more women and diverse populations into STEM is a slow process, starting with primary education and eventually moving into universities and technical schools, encouraging and cultivating talent at every step in the process. Yet research shows that gender diversity can truly make a profound impact, even to a company’s bottom line. As the co-founder of a female-led AI company, we focus on what we can do as employers to embrace and develop female talent in the workplace. I recognize that this is only one piece of the puzzle, but through the inspiring stories I hear of female coders, engineers, and technologists, I am encouraged that even small steps can make a difference.

For those of us in the retail technology sector of AI, building a workplace in which female talent thrives is especially important, as our customers are primarily women. Yet my personal work history is rooted in a much more male-dominated side of the AI industry – gaming. I started my career at a gaming startup in San Francisco where I was the first female engineer. I noticed a palpable difference when other female engineers slowly joined the team. The team dynamic changed immensely, including the team communication and strength of interpersonal connections.

At Lily AI, our initial focus on fashion and apparel within the retail space naturally attracted women to the team more easily than gaming. As we grew the company and hired more people, it became evident that having personal experiences with online shopping – whether as a male or female – brought an additional depth of understanding to the product, and the challenges of search and personalization on e-commerce sites. Still, while our styling team is most predominantly made up of women, our engineering team has taken the most concerted effort to find a gender balance. We try to be intentional about creating diversity through hiring, through our workplace culture, and in mentoring female engineers – and are currently at over 52% women on our full-time staff, a rarity within Silicon Valley.

From our experience in growing Lily AI, we’ve found there are three main elements to focus on to help promote gender diversity:

Inspire women studying engineering

 In order to have enough female talent to create gender diversity in engineering companies across the country, encouraging girls and women while they are still in school is key. Social influences still steer some girls out of STEM, and that cultural discouragement can be counteracted by showcasing female trailblazers, especially in fields like AI. We try to get out into the community, speaking to young girls and college students, offering internships and making ourselves visible as women in AI.

Encourage career growth through mentorship

 Through both formal and informal mentorship programs, it is essential to be intentional about nurturing female engineers’ career paths. It is pivotal to not only hire women into AI teams, but to ensure they have the resources they need to reach leadership positions.

Create a culture that provides equal opportunities

 In addition to paying women equal wages for equal work, prioritizing workplace benefits like flexible hours, remote work, and showcasing a track record of successful maternity leave is essential. My co-founder is currently on her own maternity leave, intentionally setting an example for the women and men at our company that this time away is not just offered, but encouraged, and that having a family does not stunt your career path at Lily.

There is still much work to be done in creating not only gender diversity in AI, but also a broader range of racial and social diversity within the tech industry at large. I am encouraged by progress we’ve made, such as currently having such brilliant women leaders on our board like Maha Ibrahim, Vanessa Larco and Marigay McKee. These women in leadership are an inspiration to me, and will hopefully be beacons to other female talent across industries.

Sowmiya Narayanan is the co-founder and CTO of Lily AI. She previously worked in technology leadership and software engineering roles at Box, Pocket Gems, Yahoo! and Texas Instruments, and has a Masters in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Texas, Austin.

Tag Archive for: artificial intelligence

International Women’s Day 2023: Artificial Intelligence, Technology and the Internet