AI Should Get to Know Women Better
68% of the 5,400 Women Surveyed
by Women Go Tech Want to Learn AI, Study Reveals
Central and Eastern Europe –Women Go Tech, the NGO facilitating gender equality and women’s participation in tech through mentorship and career support, has published Women and AI: challenges, perceptions, and perspectives in the CEE region. Spearheaded by Women Go Tech and supported by Google.org and the OSCE, the large-scale study surveyed more than 5,400 women across 13 European countries. It is the first study of its kind in the CEE region to survey real respondents, rather than relying on conclusions and insights based on expert opinions.
AI Should Get to Know Women Better
Women are significantly underrepresented in AI worldwide, both in the context of professional roles and as subjects within data sets essential to training AI systems. This pervasive underrepresentation on the professional side hinders opportunities for mentorship and perpetuates a cycle of continuous exclusion. Within AI-training datasets, the underrepresentation of women creates discriminatory biases that can impact matters as serious as healthcare diagnostics, which can fail to account for the specific needs and characteristics of the female body. In other words, AI cannot be ethical and ethically used without women’s participation, but that is already lagging behind.
To provide a holistic picture, researchers surveyed four categories of individual: women who have worked in the tech sector for more than two years (27%), women who have worked in the tech sector for less than two years (12%), women who work in other sectors but are considering a tech career (31%), and women who do not work in tech nor would consider working in tech (30%).