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We Need More Women Building AI

The Atlantic
This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
Click here for more.
We Need More Women Building AI Giving Compass
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Giving Compass’ Take:

• Lauren Smiley explains that women make up an unknown, but undoubtedly small, percentage of AI creators leading to biased programs that increase gender gaps. 

• How can philanthropy support diversity in AI creation? How can businesses increase diversity to fill vital positions and avoid inequitable AI outcomes? 

• Learn how to combat AI bias.


While women make up only a quarter of computer scientists, their numbers appear to be even smaller in the AI field in particular. While there are no government statistics on the percentage of women in AI, women at the Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS), the AI field’s top conference, made up only 17 percent of attendees in 2017.

Artificial intelligence is considered the major driver of what’s known as the fourth industrial revolution (after the steam engine, electricity and mass production, and the digital eras), with major tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft realigning around it.

Algorithms are driving ever more real-world decisions: helping doctors detect cancer; suggesting who should be released from jail, interviewed for a job, or get a loan. AI can be as biased and fallible as the humans who build it. AI has already made embarrassing mistakes, like when Google Photos auto-tagged pictures of two black people as gorillas because the algorithm, it seems, wasn’t good at correctly labeling some non-white faces. An Uber self-driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona.

While women were fighting for full sexual agency in the real world, mostly male roboticists were creating AI-enhanced mostly female sexbots.

Programs like AI4All are no doubt drawing dozens of girls, people of color, and low-income teens into a field they otherwise wouldn’t have considered—which, in combination with other coding-focused camps, such as Black Girls Code, may start to improve diversity. Still, privately-run coding camps are not as scalable or omnipresent as, say, getting a basic coding curriculum into all junior high and high schools: The tech industry isn’t missing women and minorities in the dozens, but the tens of thousands.

Read the full article about women in AI by Lauren Smiley at The Atlantic.

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Women and Girls is a complex topic, and others found these selections from the Impact Giving archive from Giving Compass to be good resources.

  • This article is deemed a must-read by one or more of our expert collaborators.
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    Taking the Hard Road in Philanthropy [Video]

    For musician Peter Buffett and his wife Jennifer, philanthropy started in 1997 with a gift of $100,000 from Peter’s father, Warren Buffett, for them to give to an organization of their choice. As it turned out, this was a prelude of sorts: successive gifts from Dad of $10 million in 1999 and $1 billion in 2006 launched the young Buffetts into philanthropy in a profound and serious way. They quickly felt that with $1 billion came not just opportunity, but also a responsibility to use those dollars wisely. So the Buffetts began to literally travel the world in search of a mission, eventually concluding that the world’s most undervalued asset is a girl. In response, they founded the NoVo Foundation to right the imbalance of power for women and girls. “We talk about reaching the last girl, the most exploited, forgotten-about, and invisible girl,” says Jennifer Buffett. Would it have been easier to support other causes? Absolutely. But when she’s 80, Jennifer wants to be able to say, “I did everything I could in the boldest way.” Learn more about the hard road at The Bridgespan Group.


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