Will AI promote Gender Equality or make it worse?

In a world where inequality between men and women rules in many sectors of activity, the power of AI could help identify, address and possibly solve those inequalities. Only 22% of AI professionals globally and only 12% of the leading machine-learning researchers are female, according to recent international reports. Because algorithms learn from real-world data, AI can potentially adopt and reinforce existing social biases. Developers could unconsciously integrate gender biases into their AI systems and perpetrate them in recruiting tools, search engines, face recognition systems, medical diagnosis and loan approval tools. AI digital assistants, obedient and obliging machines that pretend to be women are entering our homes, cars and offices and provide a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into mass market products.