In 2015, the United Nations Organization (UN) proclaimed February 11 as the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to make visible the role of women in science and promote girls’ access to STEM disciplines.
A report by Unesco, the IDB and the OECD warns that having very few women working on the design of these technologies makes it less likely that they respond to the needs of all people.
The gap experienced by the AI industry in general regarding the application of this type of technology in its processes has triggered the demand for specialized workers. However, the percentages between genders continue to be highly unbalanced. Only 16% of high-skilled AI workers are women. This low percentage is a model problem. Representation is crucial to have fair and equal artificial intelligence. As women are not represented, the models only respond to the vision and perspective of one part of the population: the male. And the algorithms, therefore, will be biased.
Only one out of five job positions in artificial intelligence or a sector related to this technology are covered by a woman, a digital and work gap that many experts call acting now to avoid further problems of gender discrimination and sex bias in the future.
The SPATIAL project tries to achieve trustworthy artificial intelligence and create an educational module that provides social-technical skills and ethical socio-legal awareness to current and future AI engineers to ensure accountable security solutions development.
Within the project, we are proud to be working with many women, some of them in scientific positions working on artificial intelligence and some of them leading any of the SPATIAL work packages:
- At the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, we work with Anouk Mols, a Postdoctoral Researcher in the SPATIAL project, and Tessa Oomen, a PhD Candidate. You can read Tessa’s interview here.
- We have a women representation at Montimage: Ana Cavalli, Research Director.
- Andra Lutu, Associate Researcher at Telefónica.
- Catholijn Jonker, Professor of Interactive Intelligence, and PhD Researcher Prachi Bagave, both at TUDelft. Read Prachi’s interview here.
- Samira Briongos works as a Cyber Security Research Scientist at NEC.
- Laura Brunn, Project Manager at Minnalear, is leading the task of Educational module development and implementation.
- Giulia Pastor, Project Manager, and Blanca Arregui, marketing manager at AUSTRALO, are in charge of the communication and dissemination of SPATIAL.
- And we also have women on the advisory board: Eve M. Schooler, a Principal Engineer and Director of Emerging IoT Networks at Intel. You can read more about her work in SPATIAL in the following interview.