Why Artificial Intelligence Is Biased Against Women

A few years ago, Amazon employed a new automated hiring tool to review the resumes of job applicants. Shortly after launch, the company realized that resumes for technical posts that included the word "women's" (such as "women's chess club captain"), or contained reference to women's colleges, were downgraded. The answer to why this was the case was down to the data used to teach Amazon's system. Based on 10 years of predominantly male resumes submitted to the company, the "new" automated system in fact perpetuated "old" situations, giving preferential scores to those applicants it was more "familiar" with. Defined by AI4ALL as the branch of computer science that allows computers to make predictions and decisions to solve problems, artificial intelligence (AI) has already made an impact on the world, from advances in medicine, to language translation apps.