From what we do to how we do it, artificial intelligence is now rewriting the realities for billions of people across the globe. However, UN Women has warned, citing multiple studies, about the AI revolution leaving women at higher risk of discrimination and violence. In a media advisory, it cited an analysis by US-based Stanford Social Innovation Review, where 44 per cent of the 133 AI systems demonstrated gender bias.
Another UNESCO study cited by the organisation reveals that 20 per cent of responses by large language models (LLMs) exhibited sexist and misogynistic attitudes. They have been found associating women with terms like ‘home’, ‘family’, and ‘children’ and men with ‘business’, ‘executive’ and ‘career’. “Honestly, it is not that LLMs are fed certain sexist remarks. They are a reflection of existing bias and prejudices of the society. It will show a doctor as a male and a nurse as a female and that is because of the generic concept of women being the caregivers,” says Jibu Elias, India lead at Mozilla Foundation, a US-based non-profit organisation promoting accessible and inclusive internet. “The bigger challenge here is how will AI actually know that society is evolving,” he adds.
The warning by UN Women comes as the global stage gets ready for United Nations Global Dialogue on Artificial Intelligence Governance from July 6 to 7 and AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland from July 7 to 10. According to Osama Manzar, founder and director, Digital Empowerment Foundation, the digital ecosystem has historically deprived women and AI is adding a top layer to it. “The actual question should be about the way AI innovation is done and infrastructure is built and if women are considered right at the design level,” he says. On the biases reflected by the technology, he notes that AI is built on large datasets and if the data, at the first place, is not collected, stored, and used ethically, LLMs will only multiply it.
As the UN Women views safety as a key component at the designing stage itself, it also reveals that in a study of 138 countries, only 24 referenced gender in a national AI strategy. Moreover, just 18 included substantive gender-responsive provisions, which can help AI help detect stereotypes, broaden representation, and improve accessibility at scale. The article further highlighted the role of AI in intensifying digital violence against women. Previous reports by the organisation reveal that almost one in four surveyed women human rights defenders, activists and journalists had experienced AI-assisted online violence and 12 per cent report having experienced the non-consensual sharing of personal images.
“AI is compounding this. Deepfakes are among the most visible examples of AI-enabled abuse that disproportionately targets women and girls,” UN Women advisory notes. Six per cent of women have been targeted through “deepfakes” or manipulated images/video, while more than one in four have received unsolicited sexual advances through digital messaging.
According to the experts, it is important to know who is building the technology before we talk about the users. “From product teams to research labs and then bodies that implement standards, the representation of women is low and any technology is a reflection of its creator,” says Elias. It is not about men particularly showing bias, he says, any homogeneous group tends to miss the issues which diverse groups identify much earlier. “Technologies like facial recognition and many applications put data breach risks because nobody addressed those issues at the design level,” he says.
A report by the International Labour Organization in March revealed that women remain underrepresented in fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and AI, making up only 30 per cent of the AI workforce globally. “More participation is a hopeful start but it is only a start to a solution. In the entire women representation, better representation of marginalised ones is needed,” says Manzar.
The economic disruption of AI is also expected to fall hardest on the women, warns the UN Women. The job market amid the AI wave has largely focused on reskilling but women face deeper practical challenges. Juhi Bhatnagar, a Gurugram-based AI investor says that she gets just enough time to focus on her current role as she is also raising two children. “The entire concept of reskilling is far more challenging for women as they are already performing multiple roles,” she says, adding that she did train a little extra so she does not lose confidence while entering a field that is predominantly led by men.
