International Women's Day: celebrating the black women tackling bias in AI

This intersectional group is disproportionately affected by instances of bias in both the design and application of AI, and they are also leading the fight to make new technologies more equitable for everyone. Intersectionality – the proposition that race, class, gender and other individual characteristics intersect in a way that impacts how a person is viewed, understood and treated – opens possibilities for deeper thinking about how injustices occur in everyday life. Kimberlé Crenshaw, a professor of law at Columbia and the University of California, Los Angeles, coined the term in 1989 in'A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics'. Crenshaw's work was rooted in Critical Race Theory – the belief that the structure of law and society are intrinsically racist – and she saw the failure to recognise the intersection of race and sex as part of that structure. In that essay, Crenshaw argues that black women, through being both black and female, suffer specific forms of discrimination that black men or white women may not.