Every year, the United Nations observes the International Day of Women and Girls in Science to promote equality in science, technology, and innovation for sustainable socio-economic development, in line with the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The AI-PRISM team joins the commemoration by presenting the gender approach of the project and interviewing women in science and technology working on this research and innovation project.
As a project funded by the Horizon Europe programme, we are one of the main instruments to reaffirm gender equality in research and innovation in the European Union. Therefore, we have integrated the gender dimension into our research and innovation, addressing individual differences and requirements so that we promote in the targeted manufacturing sectors workforce inclusivity across gender, culture, ability and age.
AI-PRISM approach to Gender equality
At AI-PRISM, gender differences and commonalities in worker behavioural patterns while executing tasks will play a critical role in our data-gathering, testing and validation activities. Furthermore, we want to avoid unnecessarily placing male and female workers in exclusive boxes and ensure that gender will not influence general results.
In the process of data-gathering, our sociocultural data will inform gender-based considerations, and additional inquiries will be made if needed throughout the project to ensure gender equality is maintained. In testing, we recognise that achieving absolute balance in samples is not always possible. Still, we will ensure that training datasets are as diverse and include different groups of individuals that equally cover genders, ages, professions, and ethnic groups. Finally, in the validation, we aim to achieve balanced groups of male and female participants for completing questionnaires, demos, and feedback.
By being aware that we are all different, we will ensure that when we design, test and validate our AI algorithms, unnoticed machine learning biases and unintentional information delivery bias are minimised.
Addressing individual differences
A key challenge in a project such as AI-PRISM is to adequately address individual differences and requirements. Therefore, we must study differences to ensure that individual needs are accommodated to promote inclusivity and ability. To this end, the social and cultural benchmark data captured will inform the design of the material so that it is tailored / tailorable for different workforce needs.
As a result, our material will be designed considering non-specialised profiles with support from social innovation, tailored to local languages, and facilitated as part of the pilot demonstration and in catalogues like I4MS Training.
Challenges facing the women working in science and technology
According to the United Nations, women are typically given smaller research grants than their male colleagues and, while they represent 33.3% of all researchers, only 12% of members of national science academies are women. Moreover, in cutting edge fields related to AI-PRISM such as artificial intelligence only one in five professionals (22%) is a woman.
In Europe, more specifically, based on the last AI Watch Index 2021, the AI research community has recently tried to incorporate a diversity of profiles. However, the indicator with the smallest increase is the one on gender (GDI), which shifts from 0.65 in 2016 to 0.69 in 2020. The GDI measures the average representation of researchers from different genders (male, female, other) at AI conferences, thus possibly revealing the impact of gender equality policies on AI research.
In 2021 according to the last Eurostat report, 74 million people in the EU are employed in science and technology, of which 52% were women, and this workforce has grown more, but 57% of them are working in service-related activities. Regarding young people, from the 17.6 million young people aged 25 to 34 working in science and technology in 2021, 9.4 million were women, more than half. We need to continue facilitating the entry of women and girls into the STEM sector, representing an increase in the EU’s GDP per capita to 3% in 2050. Still, more than that, we need social sustainability (gender equity) to tackle global challenges.
Campaigning and meeting the #AIPRISM25 Women in Science and Technology
One of the ranking criteria for the Horizon EU funding programme is to target 50% women-related boards, expert groups and evaluation committees, and gender balance among research teams. As part of this European programme, AIPRISM comprises 20 women working to make the manufacturing industry smart, improving workers’ lives and health. Throughout February, women in science and technology of the project will enrich with their experiences the promotion of gender equality in a sector that tends to face the hurdle of gender bias.
Stay tuned to our interviews with Maria Antolin Fernandez – Director of the Evaluation, Valorization and Training Area at the Technological Institute of Informatics (ITI), Elisa Tosello, postdoc researcher in Artificial Intelligence Planning and Reasoning at the Embedded Systems unit in Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Laura M.R, Front-end developer at CIGIP- Polytechnical University of Valencia (UP) and our Project Coordinator Ana Gonzalez Segura (NTT DATA Spain).