Gender Diversity in AI Research

From improved medical applications to self-driving cars and smart cities, AI has the potential to transform our digital, physical, and social environments in unprecedented ways and at an unprecedented speed. However, the same technologies can be used for mass surveillance, computational propaganda, and biased, discriminating decision-making. It is generally believed that increasing the diversity of the workforce developing AI systems will reduce the risk that they generate discriminatory and unfair outcomes, thus ensuring that their benefits are more widely shared. But how diverse is the workforce of the AI sector? We conducted a large-scale analysis of gender diversity in AI research using publications from arXiv, a widely-used preprints repository where we have identified AI papers through an expanded keyword analysis and predicted author gender using a name-to-gender inference service.