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Artificial intelligence has the potential to change the world, but the lack of women in the fast-growing field will undermine pledges to inclusive technology, top computer scientist Wendy Hall said on Friday.
Hall, a professor at the University of Southampton in the UK known for his pioneering work on web systems, said the gender imbalance had been noticeable for many years.
“All the CEOs are men,” the 73-year-old said, calling the situation at a major AI summit in New Delhi this week “shockingly dire.”
“They don’t understand the fact that it’s completely male-dominated and that effectively means 50 percent of the population is not participating in the conversation.”
Hall said gender bias “creeps into everything because we don’t think about gender bias when we create products.”
she said in an interview at the AI Impact Summit. There, dozens of governments are expected to present a common vision for how to address the promise and pitfalls of generative AI.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who is pushing India to become a global AI powerhouse, said on Thursday that advanced computing systems “must become a vehicle for inclusion and empowerment.”
But when he posed on stage for a photo with some of the biggest names in the tech industry, there were 13 men and only one woman: Joel Pinault, a former meta-researcher who is now chief AI officer at Cohere.
The same thing happened during other photo opportunities with world leaders, including French President Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
“A biased world”
A number of studies have shown how generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, reflect stereotypes contained in the vast amounts of text and images they are trained on.
“We live in a biased world, so training is based on biased data,” Hall said.
A 2024 UNESCO study found that large-scale language models describe women’s domestic roles more often than men’s, with men more likely to associate them with words such as “salary” and “career.”
While technology companies work to counter the biases built into these machines, women are finding themselves targeted by AI tools in other ways.
This year, several countries moved to ban Elon Musk’s Grok AI tool after it sparked global outrage over its ability to create sexual deepfakes depicting real people, mostly women, in skimpy clothing.
Hall, a longtime advocate for women in technology, said the situation “hasn’t gotten much better” since she joined the company decades ago.
“The situation with AI is getting worse and worse.”
Few women choose to study computer science in the first place, but “as they get more advanced, they start to leave,” Hall said.
She added that female-led startups “don’t get the investment that men get” and many are simply “fed up.”
Women also “drop out because they don’t want to join the alpha male world.”
“I almost gave up.”
Hall, who wrote her first paper on the lack of women in computing in the late 1980s, said she faced “all kinds of barriers” during her career.
“I had to push through, be strong and have good mentors, and I almost gave up many times.”
She was knighted in 2009 and has also served as a senior advisor on artificial intelligence to the UK government and the United Nations.
But during her first job interview at university nearly 50 years ago, she recalled, the all-male panel told her she couldn’t get the job because she was a woman.
“I was supposed to teach math to engineers, but I was told that as a young woman I couldn’t manage a class of male engineers.”
Hall said she doesn’t feel like there’s an overall increase in women entering the field, but she was inspired by New Delhi.
“The great thing about this conference is the young people here,” she said.
“There are a lot of young women coming from India and they are all excited about the opportunity.”
