For the most part, technological innovation made our lives better and easier, and made humanity healthier and wealthier. But I worry we are walking blindly into an AI nightmare.
Women in Technology
Affirmative Action Backlash Is Coming for Your Business. Here’s What You Can Do.
Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down the use of affirmative action in college admissions, conservatives are setting their sights on their next target: corporate America. As the CEO of Girls Who Code, a nonprofit dedicated to diversifying the tech industry, I worry about what this means in the fight to create a more representative and equitable workforce.
Rather than staying silent, corporations should follow the lead of companies like Microsoft and Salesforce which have both taken a stand against anti-affirmative action litigation. This is not a question of feel-good altruism—it’s good business, too.
How Women in Africa Are Working to End Hunger and Food Insecurity
Across Africa, women working with The Hunger Project are making incredible strides to end hunger.
From learning how to make a new dish to sell through YouTube, to growing a garden full of vegetables, women are at the forefront of a world where hunger no longer exists.
Need a Safe, Private Abortion? Ask Charley.
On Tuesday, Sept. 12, reproductive health experts launched a new online chatbot named Charley to help abortion seekers in all 50 states find quick, accurate and confidential abortion information, tailored to their individual needs and circumstances.
Charley only asks for a user’s zip code and date of their last period to determine how far along they are in their pregnancy. Charley also makes referrals to medical and legal support services, as well as community support networks. Co-founded by former Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and the former head of Planned Parenthood’s digital department Tom Subak, Charley launched in partnership with INeedAnA.com, Plan C and the Miscarriage + Abortion (M+A) Hotline.
“There’s a lot of fear and confusion out there about how abortion is available, especially in restricted states, and there are different resources out there. But there hasn’t been a single resource that includes all the information. Charley does that,” said Elisa Wells, co-director of Plan C. “Charley walks people through their options and then directs them to the resources that are available to help them find more specific information.”
How AI Puts Elections at Risk—And the Needed Safeguards
Next year will bring the first national campaign season in which widely accessible AI tools allow users to synthesize audio in anyone’s voice, generate photo-realistic images of anybody doing nearly anything, and power social media bot accounts with near human-level conversational abilities—and do so on a vast scale and with a reduced or negligible investment of money and time.
Voters need some level of transparency to promote safe AI use when it comes to elections.
Here’s How Companies Can Protect the Privacy of People Providing or Seeking Abortion Care
Following the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Center for Democracy & Technology has released a set of best practices for companies to adopt in order to better protect the privacy and safety of people seeking, providing or otherwise supporting abortion care.
Without transparency, companies could sell data to law enforcement and civil litigants—which could help prove a person sought, received, aided or provided an abortion. The best practices call on companies to consider and closely review the types of individual user data they have access to, and minimize the collection of revealing information.
Toward an Inclusive Artificial Intelligence: The Ms. Q&A With Gabriela de Queiroz
Many people see language models, like ChatGPT and other new machine learning technologies like Meta’s Make-A-Video, as the beginning of the end. And as a woman in tech—a field dominated by men—Gabriela de Queiroz has reason to be skeptical of AI.
But when de Queiroz talks about her efforts to make artificial intelligence more inclusive, she takes a different approach to understanding the ever more influential and pervasive role of AI in contemporary societies.
Pushing Back Against the Pushback: How the Nordics Tackle Online Gender Violence
We all know that the world as we know it was designed by men for men—including the internet.
“Growing resistance to human rights is happening digitally,” said Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir of Iceland.
Around the World, Internet Access Is a Women’s Issue
Women’s internet access and digital literacy lags greatly behind their male counterparts.
We will not be able to close the digital gender gap, reach complete gender equality or achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) without closing the digital divide.
ChatGPT: New Technology, Same Old Misogynoir
Machine learning inputs reflect the biases of their writers. The contributions to human history made by women, children and people who speak nonstandard English will be underrepresented by chatbots like ChatGPT.
I love technology and love it when new applications hit the market. My only wish is that AI designers ensure Black women, and all marginalized people, are fairly represented in their datasets.