World needs more women in senior AI roles for balance: AnitaB.org

As AI races ahead, tech leaders warn that without more women in leadership, innovation risks bias, exclusion and job losses that disproportionately affect women

As technology companies compete to be the best in artificial intelligence (AI), they are being asked to give women more representation in leadership roles. Brenda Wilkerson, chief executive officer of AnitaB.org, a global non-profit that advances women in the tech industry, and Shreya Krishnan, the organisation’s managing director for India, tell Avik Das in an interview in Bengaluru about the alternatives women offer and how their jobs are at risk due to automation. Edited excerpts:

 

How do you view the rush among organisations to establish supremacy in AI?

 

Wilkerson: I think that we are trying to live in this world that we want to happen. We are speaking about it as though it already is. You know, we need to take a pause before getting on board. We need to look at both sides — front and the back — before we again step on the pedal. I think it’s time to see AI as an augmenter and not as a replacement — to figure out how to make sure that the human element is integral to it; how management and leadership have to be different than in the past, because this is a different sort of beast.

 

Even looking at it technically, when you are talking about a software development lifecycle, it’s different from the AI development life cycle because of the hallucinations and all those types of things. And the fact that the data is not trained on so many portions of our world, and it’s therefore not really serving us right. We have to be iterative about how we are applying it to our solutions.

 

Why do you think more women in the tech industry will make it better?

 

Krishnan: I think women anywhere in leadership will have an impact. You cannot have a world run by people who don’t represent the people it's run for. There are very hierarchical rules of power that govern the universe; that needs to be turned because the world is leaning towards community. And that comes in when you have representation from everybody.

 

The world can’t be built by a section of the society that’s not in touch with what’s ground reality. I think if you come home, the technology landscape you see in urban India versus rural India is so different because of the same reason. The grassroots innovation that you see coming up is so vastly different because that in India is a much larger populace.

 

But the tech world, especially in AI, is dominated by men. How can women change that as leaders?

 

Wilkerson: When I was in education, we brought robotics into the classroom. What we found very quickly was that the boys would just keep trying something until it worked.

 

When I talked to a group of engineers at Microsoft who were doing AR and VR; they were designing the headsets, there was a certain percentage of them that would go to market and just fail. They didn’t understand why. Well, they weren’t male-only groups. When they added a woman to the test group as they were putting together a prototype [of a headset], they would put it on her head and the sound would immediately stop.

 

It turns out that the woman’s curly hair stopped the mechanism from working. They never had anybody with hair past their ears to test, and no one with curly hair. I mean, that’s a simple, weird kind of example but it just shows you that you need different physicalities at the table. You need different backgrounds and experiences at the table to make a difference.

 

How do we build inclusive structures?

 

Wilkerson: There are these people who are developing large language models and the AI agents and then there are people who want to be able to do whatever they want with it. They have lobbyists who lobby against any sort of regulation to slow them down.

 

They are like the little boys in school who just want to try and do not want anybody impeding it. And so we need voices that stand up and say ‘Have you thought about this?’ We’ve done some testing and there's some harm here.

 

There’s this assumption that people just need to get on board with it versus we need to get on board by making sure that it works for people, which is another thing that women are uniquely capable of.

 

Do you see women’s jobs more at risk in the age of AI?

 

Wilkerson: It’s what I fear. And if you look at what’s being automated, it’s first the things that are seen as nonessential. It was sort of a joke in the US where, during the pandemic, the people that were lauded as ‘essential’ are now the ones who are most at risk, not only for losing their jobs, but also for policy change that downgrades their jobs from essential to non-essential. And most of them are the jobs that are heavily done by women.

 

Krishnan: There is this UN report that says women’s jobs are disproportionately at risk from AI, with nearly 28 per cent roles threatened versus 21 per cent for men.

 

When people lose jobs, women lose first. For every child a man has, he gains about 7-9 per cent in salary. For every child a woman has, she loses 4-7 per cent. When you look at any kind of climate impact, any kind of sustainability impact, any kind of war, the first people that are impacted are women. That’s happening now with the AI flow as well.