FEMINIST ECONOMICS AND GENDER EQUALITY
Welcome to today’s talk on How Gender Shapes Technology with sociologist Professor Judy Wajcman of the London School of Economics. She will detail for us the crucially important way the notion of masculinity has affected scientific, technical and industrial work and our current world of algorithms.
IN THIS LESSON
Our learning objectives today are:
To examine the notion of masculinity and how it is being associated with scientific, technical and industrial work.
To understand how gender relations shape technology.
To recognise gender biases in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
KEY POINTS
We leave you with some key points.
It’s important to remember that in the first era of computers in and after World War II, there were many women programmers. They have largely been hidden from history.
Supposedly objective data which feeds our latest technologies has bias embedded in it. It is male centered. Algorithms are drawn from male models and skew everything from medical to recruitment programs.
Facial recognition technologies identify white male faces much more easily than dark-skinned female faces, because they’re trained on white faces. If the training data is biased, then the outcomes will be biased. This holds true for much else
