What the Gender Gap in Tech Could Cost Us

Brad Grossman (@bradgro) is founder and CEO of Zeitguide, a cultural think tank. As artificial intelligence gets embedded into day-to-day activities -- predicting what we need from virtual assistants, teachers, even doctors -- is the technology neutrally scrubbing out gender biases, or encoding them permanently on our future? The companies developing AI, like most of Silicon Valley, have a predominantly male workforce of engineers and developers. As Melinda Gates noted during this year's Code Conference, "When I graduated 34% of undergraduates in computer science were women… we're now down to 17%." There is real risk that such gender imbalance is invisibly shaping machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence applications.