Meet the women who want to protect the robotic workforce of the future from pre-programmed gender bias

When Microsoft debuted its AI chatbot “Tay” last year, she greeted Twitter users excitedly, gushing that she was “stoked” to be on the social network and that “humans are super cool”.

Within 24 hours Tay, which was designed to emulate a teenage girl, was telling followers to “f*** her”, calling them “Daddy” and declaring “I f***ing hate feminists”. Microsoft subsequently abandoned the project and deleted her from the internet.

Of course, Tay’s offensive outbursts were partly due to internet users’ determination to interfere with a corporate PR stunt. But they also highlighted a major problem faced by the AI industry: if robots learn from humans, there’s a good chance they’ll also adopt the biases – gender, racial and socio-economic – that exist in society. Personal assistants such as Siri and Alexa have already drawn criticism for being given subservient female personas, and the more we come to rely on AI, the more we’ll be affected by this bias.



Tabitha Goldstaub, co-founder of AI directory and community CognitionX, is particularly alarmed by AI’s potential for gender bias and, in an effort to address this, is spearheading a campaign to get more women working in the field. “When you look at what’s going on in AI with a feminist cap on, it becomes very apparent that the biases that already exist in society will be exacerbated or reinforced,” she explains. “As soon as I realised this, my antennae pricked up and I thought, ‘Someone needs to be keeping an eye on this’.”

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Goldstaub says the main areas in which AI gender bias will negatively impact people’s lives are healthcare; smart cities and automated cars. She adds that “if we’re just designing for male bodies” then insurance and finance, automated HR processes and education will also be affected. There may be issues around who’s awarded loans or policies; women may miss out on job opportunities; and as learning tools may end up being designed for boys.

“AI is such a new field that these issues really aren’t being discussed enough yet,” she says. “There are all these ethics questions flying around, but if we get more women into the industry and make them brave enough to ask these questions, people will start listening.”

The issue of healthcare is being focused on by Maxine Mackintosh, a data scientist and founder of One Health Tech, a network that promotes women in the field. “I come from a health background, which has a large number of women working in it,” she explains. “When I moved over to the health tech sphere, I was surprised how few women there were. The contrast is stark.”

Mackintosh explains that, if a bias is detected in an AI’s algorithms, then it’s easy to rectify simply by re-programming it. It’s getting people to be aware of the bias in the first place that’s the hard part. “The environment in which AI is tested has a dearth of women in it,” she says. “We do events, mentorship and conferences. We try to bring women over from healthcare to the health tech sphere, as that’s really where the future is.

“We also try to repackage and redefine tech roles to make them more attractive. Lots of people are tech people, they just don’t see themselves that way.”

This touches on a point affecting all areas of the Stem world: deeply ingrained cultural attitudes have, of course, held huge sway over who is encouraged and promoted in the field. Only 16% of computer science graduates are women, and the gender division intensifies further up the company food chain you go.

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Silvia Chiappa is a senior research scientist at DeepMind, a Google-owned AI company, where she sits on its diversity steering group. “Since my PhD, with few exceptions, I’ve been working in places with much fewer women than men,” she explains. “I also noticed that the number of women decreased in proportion to seniority.”

As well as working on diversity initiatives within the company, Chiappa has been involved with several outreach projects to promote the field of AI to those who may not otherwise consider it a career option, such as visits to schools in low-income areas of London and a South Africa-based summer school.

“Our aim is to encourage young women to aspire to careers in Stem and give them a platform to voice their ideas,” she says. At the South African summer school, which will take place in September this year, African researchers and practitioners will have the chance to learn from world-leading experts and better understand the diversity of careers in the area.

Other initiatives aimed at improving the diversity of those entering the field include Founders4Schools, where tech leaders teach pupils about different career options available to them, and Acorn Aspiration’s AI Hackathon, which introduces young people to AI skills. “As the field is relatively young, the skills haven’t been promoted in schools in the same way, say, coding has,” explains Goldstaub.

Chiappa believes the education system needs to go one step further, though. “We should establish a specific degree in machine learning, and actively encourage women to apply,” she says. “I also believe the work-life balance issue is important to address. Women often drop out of employment to look after children.”

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All the women agree that one of the biggest hurdles is making people understand what AI jobs involve, and removing the image of them as being for only super techy people. “In order to address this issue, we can’t just have tech people in the field,” says Mackintosh. “We need people from areas such as anthropology, economics and politics too.”

Goldstaub says she’s an example of someone in tech with an atypical background, having studied an arts degree and suffering from severe dyslexia – “I literally can’t do maths,” she laughs. “Traditional ‘female’ skills are so important to AI, whether it’s nurturing, mothering, caring, problem-solving, diplomacy, or critical thinking skills. I’m just so excited about all the potential there is for women in this field.”

And – hopefully – just what we need to stop the robot workforce of the future succumbing to the same fate as Tay.

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