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AI’s Hidden Figures: The Women The New York Times Forgot to Acknowledge
According to the latest “Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement” there are no Women in AI. I’m here to fix that.
Inequitable, unfair, and un-inclusive treatment towards women in technology isn’t new. Their talent, skills, accomplishments, and expertise often go unnoticed, ignored, and overlooked… no matter how Senior these women are in the industry.
And every single week, without fail, we get to witness these inequities in action: last week, we saw how a prominent tech conference invented female speakers for their event because “finding diverse speakers is hard!” Seriously, I wish I were joking.
And today… well, today, we get to see a top-12 list of all the major players in AI. And (surprise!) they didn’t include any women in the list.
None. Zero. Nada.
Isn’t that great? (*insert all the sarcasm I can muster here*)
It’s like women’s contributions to the field never existed. Even though we’ve been using their findings, research, work, and expertise in most AI platforms we use today.
And sure, women and women of color are still heavily underrepresented in AI: A 2020 World Economic Forum report uncovered that women make up only 26 percent of data and AI positions globally. But that’s not an excuse not to celebrate and recognize their accomplishments, is it?
By now, you are probably somewhat familiar with how threatening and inequitable the AI field is already and how even more dangerous it can be when Diverse voices are left out of the conversation.
We see this happening everywhere: from racial biases in AI automated images, to gender biases in AI language processors, ableism in voice-to-action tools, the myriad of biases and stereotypes in all generative AI platforms, to media bias in AI coverage.
