Catriona Wallace on

bias in tech

“We need women and girls to really start looking at the STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths. One of the great challenges with AI is that there are very few women building it – globally, for every 10 people working in AI, only one is a woman, which means 90 per cent of AI is coded by males. This leads to there being either conscious or unconscious bias built into the machines that will run our lives and our world. The data that’s being used to train the algorithms is also full of bias because it’s historical data – a reflection of the world as it’s been up until today. The train has already left the station with this. If we don’t quickly address the bias – in the data, the coders who are coding and the jobs that are going to be affected – it all puts women and minority groups way back beyond where we are today. And it’s not okay.”