The future is shaped by AI, and the future is shaped by policy. While every month at Athena is in service to women, the Athena community is celebrating Women’s History Month by partnering with two key events in AI and policy.
While every month at Athena is in service to women, the community at Athena is celebrating Women’s History Month by partnering with two very important events: the 2022 Global Women Forum on March 24 and Intel’s #AIforWomen, a month-long campaign to capture and analyze career tips from women around the world.
Historically, women have been excluded from the shaping of the world of business, of politics, of government, of technology. When it comes to technology, we know that AI is our future — business adoption is ramping up fast, and we’re still in the early years — with so much more growth on the horizon.
According to a recent HBR article, the pace of AI adoption only accelerated due to the Covid-19 pandemic: “The crisis accelerated the adoption of analytics and AI, and this momentum will continue into the 2020s, surveys show. Fifty-two percent of companies accelerated their AI adoption plans because of the Covid crisis, a study by PwC finds. Just about all, 86% say that AI is becoming a ‘mainstream technology’ at their company in 2021.”
As AI becomes the foundation for our new way of doing business, it’s imperative that women become deeply integrated into its development and potential. Otherwise, we risk AI becoming extremely biased, quickly. In fact, it already is — as AI leverages historical data sets, it’s already using data that is largely created by white men. There’s been countless reports of gender bias across AI. In a podcast released by McKinsey last year, AI was described as an imitation of the human brain, with equally human potential for bias.
In the podcast, Dr. Muneera Bano explained that: “There are two ways how I would put it in simple terms for people to understand how biases can make their way into the algorithms… Just like a human child born with nothing, no existing knowledge of any phenomena, how they understand reality by observing, by learning—this is how algorithms learn from the data. So, whatever data is provided to them, how they are trained, any biases that they will pick up, any pattern they will pick up, the only thing is how much intelligence is there in the algorithm to rectify those biases. If not, then of course they will repeat those patterns and magnify them with their computational powers.”
Dr. Bano continued: “We have seen examples of many algorithms that learn from the data and then exhibit those patterns in their output. If there is sexism embedded within the data, they will pick up that pattern and exhibit the same sexist behavior in their output. And unfortunately, the workforce in AI is male dominant. Only 20 percent of employees in the technical roles at major machine learning companies are women.”
This month, women around the world have an incredible opportunity to change the future of AI; they have the chance to ensure their thought leadership is shared with the world. Athena is partnering with Intel and the Society of Women Engineers to support the #AIforWomen initiative, hosting their data collection site and sourcing data from our community of women leaders through the month of March.
When women leaders share their best career tips on social media, we’ll capture them for Intel to aggregate and analyze leveraging the power of AI. The result will be a snapshot of insights and trends that have led to women’s career success — women around the world. Results and findings will be released in April.
Today’s economy calls for a shift from a focus on degrees to a focus on skills. As individuals re-evaluate what’s important to them in their careers, companies must re-think their approach to hiring, work, and culture. In this new economy, skills — learned in and out of work — play a crucial role in how we rise in our careers.
In parallel, as we understand this new economy and way of work, there’s a massive opportunity for women to get involved in policy. As equal players in the world economy and half of the professional workforce, women’s participation in policymaking is a must if we want to eliminate bias and prejudice, and design a better world for everyone.
Please join Athena and Diplomatic Courier at the 2022 Global Women Forum, exploring women’s paths and barriers to professional and civic success, to be held virtually during international women’s month on March 24 from 12:00 PM – 2:30 pm EST.
The Forum is an annual high-level meeting that brings together female leaders from the private sector, policy, media, and international organizations so they can leverage their experience and resources to help elevate each other in both the professional and civil realms.
This year’s Forum will be led by the CEOs and founders of both Athena and Diplomatic Courier. It will provide stakeholders with an opportunity to discuss the barriers to entering policy, the rise of the skills economy, and how to measure success in a dynamic business landscape.
While it’s critical to look to and honor our past, the world moves fast; we must constantly look forward. We continue to deal with a global pandemic, now a humanitarian crisis and war in Europe, and here in the US an ongoing and alarming divide in political views rooted in truly opposing sources for where we find and consider fact and truth. We have to look forward and act now. Women need to jump into the ring in the areas that need us the most. The future is shaped by AI, and the future is shaped by policy. I hope you will join me as I join Intel and Diplomatic Courier this month.
© Athena Alliance 2024
