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Women represent 26% of AI workforce

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Blacks, Hispanics also underrepresented in AI workforce

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Built-in viewpoints can make use of digital tool risky

By Natasha Ghoneim

CHICAGO, July 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As an

Afro-Latina woman with degrees in computer and electrical

engineering, Maya De Los Santos hopes to buck a trend by forging

a career in AI, a field dominated by white men.

AI needs her, experts and observers say.

Built-in viewpoints and bias, unintentionally imbued by its

creators, can make the fast-growing digital tool risky as it is

used to make significant decisions in areas such as hiring

processes, health care, finance and law enforcement, they warn.

"I'm interested in a career in AI because I want to ensure

that marginalized communities are protected from and informed on

the dangers and risks of AI and also understand how they can

benefit from it," said De Los Santos, a first-generation U.S.

college student.

"This unfairness and prejudice that exists in society is

being replicated in the AI brought into very high stakes

scenarios and environment, and it's being trusted, without more

critical thinking."

Women represent 26% of the AI workforce, according to a

UNESCO report, and men hold 80% of tenured faculty positions at

university AI departments globally.

Blacks and Hispanics also are underrepresented in the AI

workforce, a 2022 census data analysis by Georgetown University

showed.

Among AI technical occupations, Hispanics held about 9% of

jobs, compared with holding more than 18% of U.S. jobs overall,

it said. Black workers held about 8% of the technical AI jobs,

compared with holding nearly 12% of U.S. jobs overall, it said.

AI BIAS

De Los Santos will soon begin a PhD program in human

computer interaction at Brown University in Providence, Rhode

Island.

She said she wants to learn not only how to educate

marginalized communities on AI technology but to understand

privacy issues and AI bias, also called algorithm or machine

learning bias, that produces results that reflect and perpetuate

societal biases.

Bias has unintentionally seeped into some AI systems as

software engineers, for example, who are creating

problem-solving techniques integrate their own perspectives and

often-limited data sets.

Amazon.com ( AMZN ) scrapped an AI recruiting tool when it found it

was selecting resumes favoring men over women. The system had

been trained to vet applicants by observing patterns in resumes

submitted to the company over a 10-year period.

Most came from men, a reflection of a preponderance of men

across the industry, and the system in effect taught itself that

male candidates were preferable.

"When people from a broader range of life experiences,

identities and backgrounds help shape AI, they're more likely to

identify different needs, ask different questions and apply AI

in new ways," said Tess Posner, founding CEO of AI4ALL, a

non-profit working to develop an inclusive pipeline of AI

professionals.

"Inclusion makes the solutions created by AI more relevant

to more people," said Posner.

PROMOTING DIVERSITY

AI4ALL counts De Los Santos as one of the 7,500 students it

has helped navigate the barriers to getting a job in AI since

2015.

By targeting historically underrepresented groups, the

non-profit aims to diversify the AI workforce.

AI engineer jobs are one of the fastest growing positions

globally and the fastest growing overall in the U.S. and the

United Kingdom, according to LinkedIn.

Posner said promoting diversity means starting early in

education by expanding access to computer science classes for

children.

About 60% of public high schools offer such classes with

Blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans less likely to have

access.

Ensuring that students from underrepresented groups know

about AI as a potential career, creating internships and

aligning them with mentors is critical, she said,

Efforts to make AI more representative of American society

are colliding with President Donald Trump's backlash against

Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) programs in the federal

government, higher education and corporate levels.

DEI offices and programs in the U.S. government have been

terminated and federal contractors banned from using affirmative

action in hiring. Companies from Goldman Sachs ( GS ) to PepsiCo ( PEP ) have

halted or cut back diversity programs.

Safiya Noble, a professor at the University of California

Los Angeles and founder of the Center on Resilience & Digital

Justice, said she worries the government's attack on DEI will

undermine efforts to create opportunities in AI for marginalized

groups.

"One of the ways to repress any type of progress on civil

rights is to make the allegation that tech and social media

companies have been too available to the messages of civil

rights and human rights," said Noble.

"You see the evidence with their backlash against movements

like Blacks Lives Matter and allegations of anti-conservative

bias," she said.

Globally, from 2021 to 2024, UNESCO says the number of women

working in AI increased by just 4 percent.

While progress may be slow, Posner said she is optimistic.

"There's been a lot of commitment to these values of

inclusion," she said.

"I don't think that's changed, even if as a society, we are

wrestling with what inclusion really means and how to do that

across the board."

(Reporting by Natasha Ghoneim. Editing by Anastasia Moloney and

Ellen Wulfhorst; The Thomson Reuters Foundation is the

charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. Visit https://www.context.news/)