The gender imbalance in AI is greater than in CS overall, and that’s a big problem

My colleague, Rada Mihalcea, sent me a copy of a new (April 2019) report from the AI Now Institute on Discriminating Systems: Gender, Race, and Power in AI (see link here) which describes the diversity crisis in AI:

There is a diversity crisis in the AI sector across gender and race. Recent studies found only 18% of authors at leading AI conferences are women, and more than 80% of AI professors are men. This disparity is extreme in the AI industry: women comprise only 15% of AI research staff at Facebook and 10% at Google. There is no public data on trans workers or other gender minorities. For black workers, the picture is even worse. For example, only 2.5% of Google’s workforce is black, while Facebook and Microsoft are each at 4%. Given decades of concern and investment to redress this imbalance, the current state of the field is alarming.

Without a doubt, those percentages do not match the distribution of gender and ethnicity in the population at large. But we already know that participation in CS does not match the population. How do the AI distributions match the distribution of gender and ethnicity among CS researchers?

A sample to compare to is the latest graduates with CS PhDs. Take a look at the 2018 Taulbee Survey from the CRA (see link here).  19.3% of CS PhD’s went to women. That’s terrible gender diversity when compared to the population, and AI  (at 10%, 15%, or 18%) is doing worse. Only 1.4% of new CS PhD’s were Black. From an ethnicity perspective, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft are doing surprisingly well.

The AI Now Institute report is concerned about intersectionality. “The overwhelming focus on ‘women in tech’ is too narrow and likely to privilege white women over others.” I heard this concern at the recent NCWIT Summit (see link here).  The issues of women are not identical across ethnicities. The other direction of intersectionality is also a concern. My student, Amber Solomon, has published on how interventions for Black students in CS often focus on Black males: Not Just Black and Not Just a Woman: Black Women Belonging in Computing (see link here).

I had not seen previously a report on diversity in just one part of CS, and I’m glad to see it. AI (and particularly the sub-field of machine learning) is growing in importance. We know that having more diversity in the design team makes it more likely that a broader range of issues are considered in the design process. We also know that biased AI technologies are already being developed and deployed (see the Algorithmic Justice League). A new Brookings Institute Report identifies many of the biases and suggests ways of avoiding them (see report here). AI is one of the sub-fields of computer science where developing greater diversity is particularly important.