For two weeks in March, I had the pleasure of being chosen from over 3,000 candidates as a UN Women UK Official Delegate for the 67th Meeting of The UN Commission for the Status of Women (CSW67). This wonderful international assembly of impartial advocates, representatives of presidency and teams was centered on the first theme of ‘Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.’

UN Women UK is the United Kingdom’s nationwide committee of UN Women, a subset of the United Nations group devoted to gender equality and ladies’s empowerment. UN Women UK works in the direction of selling gender equality and ladies’s rights within the UK and globally by means of numerous initiatives, campaigns and partnerships, advocating for coverage change, elevating consciousness of gender-based discrimination and violence and selling ladies’s financial empowerment.

A small however mighty charity, they work in the direction of reaching gender equality in all spheres of life together with management, training, well being and political participation. Additionally, UN Women UK work to have interaction males as allies in empowering ladies by means of initiatives such as #heforshe.

Throughout the 2 weeks, we had been handled to a spread of occasions masking totally different speaking factors in expertise, together with AI and knowledge. The core theme emphasised the need for innovation and training in areas reminiscent of knowledge literacy to be leveraged to advertise gender equality, empower ladies and women, and tackle gender-based violence.

The intersection of tech, gender and equality

The intersections of expertise, gender and equality may be complicated, particularly in relation to AI. A core theme of CSW67 was the dearth of range in groups developing AI systems; one of many foremost challenges for the expertise is its potential to perpetuate present biases and inequalities. There is a rising concern that AI methods have been confirmed to be biased in opposition to ladies, minorities, and different marginalised teams.

For instance, picture turbines or giant language fashions (LLM) are educated on datasets full of these biases. When algorithms are taught on knowledge units that comprise biases, they’re more likely to reproduce them of their output. This is why it’s important to make sure that the information fashions draw from is consultant of a wider subset of society to keep away from amplifying present issues.

Examples got in on-line talks by teams reminiscent of Feminist Task Force. The group’s audio system notably highlighted the issues faced by asylum seekers trying to access the US government migration app, ‘CBP One’, notably in Haiti and on the US-Mexico border. One of the highest points confronted by households and people utilizing the app is errors in recognising faces with darker pores and skin tones. Repetitive failure to simply accept entries and establish customers has induced main delays in registering and processing purposes, with calls now being made by authorized and advocacy teams for investigations into failures.

Speaking at “A Gender Equal World with Technologies, Digitalisation and AI”, Vera Jourová of the European Commission centered on gender stereotypes, AI algorithms and the great potential that expertise and digitalisation has for our lives. She mentioned the significance of stopping new expertise from perpetuating gender stereotypes and bias, emphasising that work on this space shouldn’t undermine gender equality or the democratic mannequin.

The European Commission need the roadmap for a world digital compact to be gender transformative, and Jourová talked about that the EU promotes a human-centred method to the digital transition. There are at the very least two proposals, based on Jourová, that are being steered to deal with the gender digital divide by EU co-legislators. One of those, The Artificial Intelligence Act, covers reinforcement of biases and the way they could be counteracted.

A digital training motion plan, which focuses on the digital readiness of training and coaching methods and encourages women to be educated in STEM, can also be at present in progress and operating as much as 2027. The technique contains targets to deal with the digital divide, together with aiming for 80% of the EU inhabitants to have primary digital expertise by 2030, with 20 million turning into ICT specialists — and this quantity needs to be gender balanced.

Fighting bias in AI

To tackle this topic and different technology-related considerations round gender equality, UN Women UK organised a particular in-person occasion at The Roundhouse in London, attended by a choose group of 250 members chosen from the almost 3,000 UK delegates who took half this 12 months. The occasion facilitated in-depth discussions on leveraging expertise to advertise gender equality with out perpetuating present biases.