As a VP at F5, Christine Puccio is a leader in the technology industry and a champion for diversity and inclusion. Imagine you've just turned on your computer and it suddenly tells you all about itself. What it is, what it can do and all its capabilities. "The more humans share with me, the more I learn," it says. "I come in many forms as artificial intelligence. Many companies utilize me to optimize their tasks. I can continue to learn on my own. I am making predictions on your life right now."

When Katica Roy returned to work after the birth of her daughter, her supervisor asked her to take on two new teams, tripling her workload in a matter of two weeks without additional pay or a promotion. Meanwhile, management asked a male colleague to take on one extra team. With his new responsibilities came a promotion and more pay. In order to get the pay equity due her, Roy notified her human resources team about the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a federal law that helps pay practices are non-discriminatory and fair, without gender or other bias, by making it easier to file equal-pay lawsuits. While she ended up succeeding in her gender bias protest, the process led Roy to found and become CEO of Pipeline Equity, a SaaS vendor that uses cloud-based AI, machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) technology to improve the financial performance of its users by trying to close the gender equity gap.

doi: 10.1093/jamia/ocab113. Online ahead of print. ABSTRACT. There has been increased excitement around the use of machine learning (ML) and …

Removing bias from talent decisions helps companies move closer to gender equity with every new hire, performance evaluation, and pay/compensation decision. No longer must companies rely on informal relationships and unconscious bias to make critical human capital decisions. With the tools of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, organizations can use objective data to do what's in their financial best interest as well as the best interest of their employees. After all, gender equity is more than a social issue, it's also a stunning economic opportunity.

The world's largest tech conference has apparently learned a big lesson about gender equity. CES, the huge annual consumer-electronics show in Las Vegas, caught major flak from activists in late 2017 when it unveiled an all-male lineup of keynote speakers for the second year in a row. Although it later added two female keynoters, the gathering's'boys' club' reputation remained intact. Stripper robots perform at the Sapphire Gentlemen's Club on the sidelines of CES 2018 in Las Vegas. It didn't help that one of the unsanctioned events latching on to CES last year was a nightclub featuring female'robot strippers.'

Lucas asserted "... technology-enhanced teaching and learning can dramatically improve the quality and success of higher education ..." His Figure 1 and Figure 2, in outlining traditional versus technology-enhanced courses, suggested traditional teaching methods deliver a low-quality result, while professional (Hollywood) production methods deliver a high-quality result, with, again, no evidence provided. The idea of universities as "content producers" giving students "content" consisting of "course materials and exercises" gave me an analogous idea. Families give food and clothing to their children, but families are inefficient and can involve bloated administrations (parents). Just as parents do more than feed (they try to create an environment where their children can develop and thrive), universities likewise try to create a learning environment for students. Indispensable elements include laboratory work, fieldwork, real essays marked by real scholars (not against a list of bullet points), and project work.