Feminism Confronts AI: The Gender Relations of Digitalisation
The Sussex Digital Humanities Lab is delighted to announce Professor Judy Wajcman as this years’ Annual Keynote speaker.
In this talk Judy Wajcman (LSE & The Alan Turing Institute) examines the gender relations of digitalisation, with a particular focus on AI as the most contemporary feature of this. There is increasing recognition that technologies are both a reflection and crystallisation of society, but I will argue that there is still insufficient focus on the ways in which gendered power relations are embedded in technoscience. This is as much the case with AI as it was with previous waves of technological change.
I begin by describing how the gender skills gap in STEM education and the AI workforce is based on historically constructed equations between masculinity and technical expertise. Adopting an intersectional technofeminist approach, I argue that technologies are gendered by association and by design, resulting in a stark lack of diversity in the fields of AI and data science. The dominance of men working in and designing AI results in a feedback loop whereby social bias gets built into machine learning systems. Digitalisation poses the risk of encoding and amplifying existing patterns of gender inequities. Understanding this is particularly important at a time when AI tools are marketed as the solution to all social problems. At a moment when technology is affecting the lives of everyone in ways both profound and subtle, this warrants urgent attention.
This event is part of the Summer of Research 2024, a festival celebrating fantastic research from the University of Sussex and its positive impact. Sign up for other exciting events here!