Can artificial intelligence really advance gender equality?

Lacey tells me about LifeForce, another AI innovation specifically designed to support women, mothers and single mothers. It is an AI-enabled platform designed to match the supply and demand of aid subsequent to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: “The initial product design took the needs of women and especially single mothers into account after the conscription of males into the Ukrainian resistance effort, as did the design of its analytics, the prioritization of product creation, and the ticketing system for assistance with delivery and community driven help. Another low-tech, but hugely impactful detail was also kept in mind – shelters were designed and built with children’s play areas included.” 

Brianne Kimmel – the Founder of Worklife Ventures and the most active female investor in Generative AI in the world today –  believes AI is the greatest force for equality and democratic ideals we’ve ever known. Brianna does not believe that gender biases in AI are unavoidable, telling me that she’s seen many tools that help people, especially men, be more empathetic and give women an equal voice in meetings: “Poised, an AI-powered meeting assistant, gives you real-time metrics like interruptions, filler words, and time spent talking during a meeting. This is especially helpful for managers to empower and call on early career professionals to share their ideas on meetings. We’re seeing a whole new wave of tools that help us be kinder in emails and other forms of written communication and give credit where credit is due. Promotions in the future will be based on contribution and merit, not just given to the loudest and most confident voice in the room.” 

Dr Emilia Molimpakis, Neuroscientist and the CEO & Co-Founder of thymia explains how the very problem of bias in AI, may help us create real-world solutions. 

Dr Emilia explains that while AI can be an incredibly powerful tool, unless developed responsibly, ethically and with great care it can open the door to significant biases of all sorts, including gender biases. Saying “This is because AI cannot think for itself; it can only draw conclusions based on the datasets on which it has been trained. So if the data is gathered in a way that means it inherently contains biases, then this will lead to bias in the model as well. For example, in a model trying to estimate the prevalence of depression, if there are more women than men in the dataset or there is not an even split between women and men with high and low depression scores, or the researchers only include women with high scores and men with low scores, you can easily imagine how the model then assumes that any new woman it encounters will naturally be more likely to have a high depression score.”

Continuing to tell me that “Women are so often underrepresented within research and data – particularly in areas such as healthcare – leading many public data sets to be inherently biased against them in various ways. It is up to the researchers building the AI tools to continuously check for such biases in their datasets and in the models themselves in order to catch and correct for it. This is considered ethical AI and is best practice. The Alan Turing institute has published really excellent guidelines around ethical AI principles and if researchers follow these, they can easily overturn any potential gender bias in their models.”

“For the same reason that AI models can naturally create biases, they can also be used to help overturn any unfair preconceptions that have been socially ingrained in us as humans. If an AI model is fed a well-balanced dataset, based on a diverse group of men and women, all receiving equal pay and progressing equally through the ranks, this AI model will then learn and assume that any new woman or man it encounters should be treated equally to one another. AI could be used to breathe fresh air into what is a stagnant societal and workforce environment with respect to gender inequality and could help to show with more objectivity that women and men can and should be treated equally and offered the same opportunities.”

As we live in the throws of an AI revolution, the most important thing we can do is stay informed. AI and its future is not something that has to happen to women. Maybe it could be for women?