At a session on artificial intelligence during the Women and the future of science conference at the Royal Society in London, panellists discussed how new AI technologies are designed almost exclusively by men. Experts pointed to recent regressions in diversity and called for alternative models prioritising care. The discussion addressed biases beyond datasets, focusing on the industry's composition.
The session, chaired by computer scientist Wendy Hall, took place on the second day of the Women and the future of science conference at the Royal Society in London. An AI transcription tool repeatedly mistyped the name 'Julie' as 'Julian', underscoring the session's theme of women being erased from AI technologies. Panellists argued that this reflects a deeper issue: new AI systems, poised to transform society, are developed predominantly by men in a historically male-dominated tech sector. In the UK, only 25 per cent of computer science students are women, and Silicon Valley has grown more hostile to women in recent years, according to David Leslie of the Alan Turing Institute. He stated, “In the past two years, there’s been a regress,” attributing some impact to the Trump administration's policies, including a recent executive order targeting 'woke AI' and directing the US National Institute of Standards and Technology to remove references to misinformation, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and climate change from its AI risk framework. Rumman Chowdhury, a former US science envoy for AI and head of ethics at Twitter before her team was fired under Elon Musk, remarked, “I am in the world of frontier AI, and that is the world of AI without women.” Rachel Coldicutt, who researches social impacts of emerging technologies, echoed this: “If we think about what the world looks like without women in AI, I think that’s what we have at the moment. It’s not fantasy at all.” Examples of the gender data gap include technologies like crash test dummies and medical research designed for men. Chowdhury noted that only 2 per cent of venture capital funds women-led ventures and less than 1 per cent of healthcare research targets women's health conditions. Coldicutt urged, “We need to make tech work for 8 billion people, not eight billionaires,” and advocated for new models that 'prioritise care for people, for the planet.' Leslie called for transforming incentives to encourage AI development for social good, while Hall referenced the all-male 1950s Dartmouth conference that defined AI.
