Women have faced gender-based discrimination in the workforce throughout history, denied employment in all but a handful of subservient roles, regularly ignored for promotions and pay raises -- and rarely ever compensated at the same rates as their male peers. This long and storied socioeconomic tradition of financially screwing over half the population continues largely unabated into the 21st century where women still make 84 cents on the dollar that men do. In her new book, The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future, Professor of Law and founding member of the Center for Intellectual Property Law and Markets at the University of San Diego, Dr. Orly Lobel, explores how digital technologies, often maligned for their roles in exacerbating societal ills, can be harnessed to undo the damage they've caused. This article has been excerpted from The Equality Machine: Harnessing Digital Technology for a Brighter, More Inclusive Future by Orly Lobel. For years, the double standard was glaring: employers demanded secrecy about salaries while asking prospective employees for their salary histories.

Children who grow up in low-income households but who make friends that come from higher-income homes are more likely to have higher salaries in adulthood than those who have fewer such friends. "There's been a lot of speculation… that the individuals' access to social capital, their social networks and the community they live in might matter a lot for a child's chance to rise out of poverty," says Raj Chetty at Harvard University. To find out how if that holds up, he and his colleagues analysed anonymised Facebook data belonging to 72.2 million people in the US between the ages of 25 and 44, accounting for 84 per cent of the age group's US population. It is relatively nationally representative of that age group, he says. The team used a machine learning algorithm to determine each person's socioeconomic status (SES), combining data such as the median income of people who live in the same region, the person's age, sex and the value of their phone model as a proxy for individual income.

Kaggle recently released the most results of its annual State of Data Science and Machine Learning survey for 2020. For the fourth year, Kaggle surveyed its community of data enthusiasts to share trends within a quickly growing field. Based on responses from 20,036 Kaggle members, we've created this report focused on the 13% (2,675 respondents) who are currently employed as data scientists. The overview of the report can be viewed online here. Alternatively, you can look at the survey's executive summary, or view and interact with the survey's raw data.

AI and Machine Learning Will Change UX Research & Design- During our Q and A session at the June Virtual UX Conference, an attendee asked Jakob Nielsen if and how artificial intelligence and machine learning might affect UX research and design. Here's what Jakob had to say. Well, I think that there are two angles to that and the first angle is that the user interface will employ more artificial intelligence than it did in the past and that will also therefore change what UX people have to do. We did a study recently in China of how you pay by smile. "So I got my croissant paid for" it was one of our test users and they didn't quite understand how it was doing it. So even though face recognition is a great technology, right?

The Mad Men era of advertising is long behind us, but some of its lessons are timeless: not least those imparted by David Ogilvy, the founder of Ogilvy & Mather, who was once described by Time magazine as "the most sought-after wizard in today's advertising industry". That was in 1962, but even today, 17 years after his death, Ogilvy remains one of advertising's most revered minds, universally acknowledged as the father of modern advertising and credited with pioneering a unique style of ad that didn't insult the intelligence of the individual. But what could today's advertising leaders, or indeed those just starting out on their advertising careers, learn from Ogilvy? The Drum decided to find out, teaming with IBM's Watson to analyse Ogilvy's myriad writings and talks to draw out insights and advice. A man of many words, Ogilvy became the authority on advertising in his day, penning a number of books on the subject and representing the industry in numerous TV and newspaper interviews.