A New AI Lexicon: Gender

Recent conversations around gender and AI have centred around the need to understand gender beyond the binary of male and female. For example, facial recognition technology used by Uber in the US has problems with correctly recognising transgender persons (see here and here). Yet Uber is no exception. The U.S. National Science Foundation, for example, has highlighted research that shows that "facial analysis services performed consistently worse on transgender individuals, and were universally unable to classify non-binary genders." According to CNN Business,¹ "The way a computer sees gender isn't always the same way people see it. A growing number of terms for describing one's gender are becoming common in everyday life."