Machine Learning Needs Bias Training to Overcome Stereotypes

It's no secret that there is a wide gender gap in the tech industry. According to the Center for the Study of the Workplace, women represent around 20 percent of engineering graduates, but just 11 percent of practicing software engineers. Unconscious bias is one of the primary drivers of this disparity, which has led many of Silicon Valley's leading tech companies to introduce unconscious bias training to their employees. However, it's fair to say that its machine learning algorithms need it more. In humans, unconscious biases are ingrained assumptions about particular personal attributes (including race or gender) that can influence decision making without the decision maker being explicitly aware.