Communications of the ACM
AI Is the Future–But Where Are the Women?
Big tech companies agree that every aspect of our lives will soon be transformed by artificial intelligence and machine learning. Yet the people whose work underpins that vision don't much resemble the society their inventions are supposed to transform. Wired worked with Montreal startup Element AI to estimate the diversity of leading machine learning researchers, and found that only 12 percent were women.
That estimate came from tallying the numbers of men and women who had contributed work at three top machine learning conferences in 2017. It suggests the group supposedly charting society's future is even less inclusive than the broader tech industry, which has its own well-known diversity problems.
At Google, 21 percent of technical roles are filled by women. A review of Google's AI research pages earlier this month listed 641 people working on "machine intelligence," of whom only 10 percent were women. Facebook said last month that 22 percent of its technical workers are women. At the company's AI research group, 15 percent or workers are women.
Anima Anandkumar, a professor at the California Institute of Technology, says the risks AI systems will cause harm to certain groups are higher when research teams are homogenous. "Diverse teams are more likely to flag problems that could have negative social consequences before a product has been launched," she says. Research has also shown diverse teams are more productive.
From Wired
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