Where are the female stars in AI?

AI specialist is the UK’s top emerging job for 2021, reports LinkedIn research.

But data from the World Economic Forum shows that women fill a mere 22% of global AI jobs. The lion’s share – the remaining 78% – are all occupied by men.

Yet, while it is true that women leaders in the technology industry are trailing their male counterparts – both in top-level presence and C-level roles – some shining stars are leading the way.

There may be a hefty gender difference. But there are many brilliant women spearheading AI’s momentum today. These pioneering females are the role models for the next generation of AI leaders. They reflect what tomorrow’s more diverse AI community can, and should, look like.

Change is emerging. More companies are now realising how important it is for their AI teams to include women.

Why? Because, quite aside the different set of skills and perspective women bring, without them those companies run the risk of the likelihood of AI systems being biased to a vision that represents only half of humanity…

Below we highlight five of the female stars in 2021 in AI in fields from research to policy to entrepreneurship.

1. Cassie Kozyrkov, Google’s lead data scientist and prominent advocate of safe, reliable AI

All the component skills of the successful data scientist — critical thinking, structured approach, creativity, intuition, and big picture business view — are gender neutral. Perhaps no one is more evidence of this than Cassie.

She has founded the field of ‘decision intelligence’ at Google. What she does is to unsilo departments, from research to the teams that apply algorithms to business functions, and she has trained more than 17,000 Google staff in the process.

“Typical data science training might teach you how to analyse survey data but not how to design the survey in the first place. If the survey is poorly designed, no amount of math can help,” she told Wired. Cassie uses applied data science, AI and analytics to create better tools and products and brings social science, decision theory and managerial science together with data science to inform our understanding of how actions lead to outcomes.

2. Winnie Cheng, CTO of Flowcast, the fintech startup that provides AI solutions to modernise credit and collection

Women just do things differently, as Winnie, who earned her MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford and PhD in Computer Science and AI from MIT, says so eloquently.

“When you’re talking about deploying a solution (AI), you have to make sure you think about the impact on all the different stakeholders. Maybe I’m a bit biased but I think women are more empathetic to different stakeholders, so we’re able to pick up on more,” she says.

“For example, AI is automating a lot of jobs, so (we have to think) how does that impact the person sitting across the room or whose job is manual now, and what would be the right way of positioning the message for your technology.”

3. Ritika Gunnar, vice president of IBM’s Data and AI Expert Labs and Learning and part of IBM’s women leaders in AI recognition programme.

If companies want to increase the number of women working in AI — and increase diversity in the field across every dimension — then leaders must celebrate the diversity that exists, she believes: “I actually started at IBM in systems management, then moved to data, moved again to analytics, and from there to artificial intelligence.”

She leads a team of over 2,400 highly technical experts focused on advising, architecting and delivering client success with data, automation, and other AI use cases.

“We should expose girls to AI, math and science at a much earlier age so they have a support system in place,” she told Forbes Magazine recently.

4. Daniela Rus: Director, MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL)

One of the world’s leading roboticists, Daniela is an MIT professor and the first female head of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), one of the largest and most prestigious AI research labs in the world.

She imagines a future “where robots are so integrated in the fabric of human life that they become as common as smart phones are today”.

“It is important for people to understand that AI is nothing more than a tool. Like any other tool, it is neither intrinsically good nor bad. It is solely what we choose to do with it,” she said to Forbes Magazine this year.

5. Joy Buolamwini, founder of the Algorithmic Justice League to create a world with more equitable and accountable technology.

Joy highlighted the racial and gender prejudices embedded in facial recognition systems through her pioneering work on algorithmic bias. As a result, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM suspended their facial recognition offerings, admitting that the technology was not yet fit for public use.

“We have a very narrow vision of what technology can enable right now because we have very low participation. I’m excited to see what people create when it’s no longer just the domain of the tech elite,” she told The Guardian.

Without women digital enterprises – and the world – will not reach the maturity levels they need.

These women, and many others like them, are showing the way.