The World Economic Forum found that only 22 per cent of AI professionals are women, even though their jobs are more likely to be disrupted than men’s jobs.GETTY IMAGES
Susan Diaz has spent her career at the forefront of new technology. A Gen Xer and marketing consultant, she led companies through the dawn of the dot-com era, the birth of social media and, for the past 10 years, the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
About a decade ago, Ms. Diaz’s clients began asking her about using AI, prompting her to learn as much as she could about the technology.
“I thought, this is not going to go away. Humankind is going to have to learn how to use it,” says the Toronto-based AI marketing expert, instructor and podcaster.
As she delved into this new field, eventually becoming an in-demand speaker on AI literacy and a mentor/coach for women and non-binary entrepreneurs with the AI Skills Lab Canada project, Ms. Diaz found that when it comes to generative AI technology, women are more apprehensive and slower to adapt.
AI marketing expert Susan Diaz sees the present as a pivotal moment where women need to seize the opportunities that exist in AI.SUPPLIED
One issue is that women tend to see using AI as “cheating,” Ms. Diaz says. For example, if they use a program like Grammarly – a writing assistant that uses AI to improve written communication – they feel they are not doing the work themselves. They fear losing critical thinking and problem-solving skills, she adds.
Indeed, a recent Harvard study found women are adopting AI tools like ChatGPT at a 25 per cent lower rate than men. The study’s authors found that women were concerned by the ethics of using the tools and feared they would be judged harshly for relying on them.
That trepidation has resulted in the underrepresentation of women in AI, with far fewer women holding leadership positions in this area. For example, the World Economic Forum found that only 22 per cent of AI professionals are women, even though more women’s jobs than men’s (57 per cent) are set to be disrupted by AI over the next decade.
Ms. Diaz sees the present as a pivotal moment where women need to seize the opportunities that exist in AI. “I feel like this is literally one of those milestone moments. It is an opportunity to even the playing field.”
Boosting confidence through training
The Harvard study also concluded that women’s reticence to embrace AI is harmful because as the technology becomes more ingrained, female workers risk falling behind their male counterparts – less skilled and therefore less valuable.
Erin Beattie, a Victoria-based communications consultant, has been an early adopter of AI tools and ensures she is on the cutting edge of new technology. But she finds that some of the women she works with are less inclined to use AI.
In her experience, female workers may worry about getting it wrong with AI and want to master the technology on their own before they attempt to use it in their work lives. “[Women feel they] need permission to explore these new tools without there being some sort of risk,” she says.
Communications consultant Erin Beattie says that the women she works with often want to master AI tools on their own time before using them professionally.SUPPLIED
To help boost women’s confidence in this area, workplaces should be providing AI training, says Ms. Diaz, but she doesn’t see that happening quickly enough. For example, she says organizations will often ask her to do a one-hour training session for employees, which is nowhere near what’s needed.
Plus, workers are often apprehensive about the AI training sessions they do get.
“The jokes [among employees] are that ‘I’m basically training my replacement.’ And I don’t think companies are getting ahead of that narrative at all.”
Showing women they are welcome
Educational institutions must increase the number of women in their AI programs and encourage AI literacy among women prior to university, says Francis Syms, associate dean of the faculty of applied sciences and technology at Humber Polytechnic in Toronto. He says Humber is working to increase the proportion of women instructors as well.
Mr. Syms notes that Humber is now embedding AI across all programs. “Our expectation is that all learners need to leave Humber with AI fluency in order be competitive.” The Polytechnic also offers support and mentorship programs for women throughout their academic paths and hosts an annual conference for women in STEM.
Alona Fyshe, associate professor at the University of Alberta and a Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) AI Chair, does research into building language models. She says in her area of AI, it can be difficult to attract female students.
“It is very well-documented that there are not a lot of women in machine learning,” she says, adding that “machine learning can be very math-heavy, and that can scare some people off.”
Prachi Majmudar, a student enrolled in Artificial Intelligence with Machine Learning at Humber, says that when she started the post-graduate program, 85 to 90 per cent of the students were male. She had to work harder to prove herself in the beginning, she adds, but she hopes to one day own her own AI-focused business.
“In the next 10 years, if machine learning engineers are all men, how do you expect them to solve certain issues which are faced by women?” she says.
A desire to solve real-world problems
Though some women may worry they are not suited to work in AI, Jennifer Hufnagel, an AI educator and owner of Hufnagel Consulting in Nanoose Bay, B.C., says AI rewards what women do best: communication, critical thinking, problem solving and collaboration.
“In business, women have long been the translators, bridging teams, departments and ideas. So it’s no surprise we’re also skilled at communicating with ‘robots,’” she says.
Ms. Fyshe says there are areas of AI where women are taking the lead. She notes that careers in which AI is used to solve a medical or biological problem seem to attract more women.
For example, Azadeh Yadollahi, a senior scientist at the University Health Network’s KITE Research Institute, whose background is in biomedical engineering, uses AI to develop digital technologies for diagnosing and treating sleep problems, including sleep apnea.
While Ms. Yadollahi says she is seeing increasing numbers of women entering STEM programs and careers – a positive development – those numbers narrow at the top.
“We need to have another strong pull to promote diverse women to get into leadership roles,” she says of the gap.
Rethinking AI to remove ‘systemic barriers’
Mr. Syms suggests that one way to get more women into AI is to rethink how post-secondary programs are set up. He points out that while many women start out in difficult math and calculus courses in university, a large number drop out as time goes on.
“We might not even need these courses [to study AI],” he says.
Mr. Syms is preparing to speak (as an ally) at an upcoming APEC summit in Korea, where the theme is empowering women in AI.
“I think there are systemic barriers in the programs we need to take a serious look at,” he says. “Women are using this [AI], but men are the ones deciding at the top when the AI systems are trained.”
Part of the solution is through government regulation, he suggests. For example, the federal government’s Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy includes a focus on recruiting diverse talent.
Mentorship and role modelling in the corporate world can go a long way to bring women to the industry, says Ms. Diaz, but she advocates “going further than mentorship into sponsorship. Then you are actively taking on responsibility for those outcomes. Introduce [women] to the right faces, send them to the right tables.”
It’s imperative for women to participate in the development of AI in order to shape its future, says Ms. Beattie. If they don’t, the risk is that AI will be lacking diverse perspectives and could perpetuate gender-based stereotypes.
As she says, “We don’t need more women using AI, we need more women deciding what it’s for.”
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Stacie Campbell/The Globe and Mail