AI For Social Good: Addressing the need for women in tech The McGill Tribune

Summer Lab Diversity Coordinator Jihane Lamouri believes that having a variety of perspectives, as the program encourages, is crucial to the development of AI: If a society is biased, so, too, are its machines. At the Lab's closing event, Lamouri referenced the alleged sexism that machine translation services like Google Translate or Microsoft's Bing Translator exhibit. When translating phrases from gender-neutral languages like Finnish or Turkish, machine translators may assign gender pronouns illustrative of a gender bias to the English translation. Users have complained that in the hands of a machine translator the phrase "they are engineer" becomes "he is an engineer," whereas the phrase "they are a nurse" becomes "she is a nurse." Lamouri hopes that having more women in the industry will lead to the identification of gender bias in AI.