There’s a Massive Gender Gap in AI, but Tech Education Programs for Young Girls Aim to Close It
Iridescent, a tech education nonprofit, teaches women and girls about AI, tech entrepreneurship and more. So far, it’s trained more than 114,000 people from 115 countries.
Tara Chklovski had the weight of her family on her shoulders.
Growing up in India in what she calls a lower-middle-class family, it was difficult not to notice the poverty around her — especially the pivotal role chance plays in determining the family someone is born into, as well as their access to education, healthcare and opportunity.
Chklovski’s parents encouraged her to pursue a subject that intrinsically advanced the world, hoping it would also advance their family’s situation. “That is definitely the mantra of the times in India,” says Chklovski. “The lower middle class has this drive to get a degree in engineering or medicine or technology so you can lift your family out of poverty.”
She came to the U.S. to study aerospace engineering and quickly found that that same drive to pursue tech didn’t apply — especially in the women she met. The U.S. may be a more developed country, she thought, but here, women actively kind of closed doors to their potential, making blanket statements like, “I’m not good at math.” Chklovski was stunned someone could say that with a straight face, but she was also intrigued. She did some digging and concluded that the “huge, transforming lever” that is education was at the root of the problem.
Chklovski wanted to become a pioneer in the area, so she left her PhD program to start Iridescent, an educational nonprofit that says it’s helped train more than 114,000 people from 115 countries since its 2006 launch. The organization sets its sights on empowering young girls and mothers to become tech leaders in communities across the globe, partnering with the likes of Google, GM and Boeing in its mission to teach AI and entrepreneurship to people who have identified problems they’d like to solve in their own communities.
It’s a man’s, man’s, man’s world — especially if you’re looking at the technology sector.
At eight major tech companies, women make up between 27 percent (Microsoft) and 47 percent (Netflix) of the workforce, according to data recently compiled by Statista. But when it comes to tech jobs in tech — think developers, engineers and the like — the numbers are bleaker: At seven tech giants with data for that category, an average of eight in 10 jobs belonged to men.
Research from longer-term studies backs that up. One report analyzing the number of women in selected STEM fields from 1990 to 2013 found that the number of women in computing fell from 35 percent to 26 percent over that time period. Break it down by race and ethnicity, and you’ll find that black women hold just three percent of jobs in computing, while the statistic is one percent for Hispanic women and a fraction of a percent for American Indian and Alaska Native women.
In AI, the problem is no different. Just 18 percent of authors at leading AI conferences are women, and more than 80 percent of AI professors are men. Women make up 15 percent of AI research staff at Facebook and 10 percent at Google, according to a new report from the AI Now Institute, and there is no public data on trans workers or other gender minorities. Another key point the report makes: Focusing solely on improving the ratio of women in tech is “too narrow and likely to privilege white women over others.”
“To date, the diversity problems of the AI industry and the issues of bias in the systems it builds have tended to be considered separately,” the report reads. “But we suggest that these are two versions of the same problem: Issues of discrimination in the workforce and in system building are deeply intertwined.”
Indeed, the issue not only impacts women and girls who could be contributing to the field but also the broader public — the people the tools are being made for.
