Technology data requires greater involvement of women in all stages of innovation – EURACTIV.com

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More female participation is needed at all stages of the technology product and policy development process to prepare for a digital future that works for all, innovators and industry figures say.

Speaking at the G20 Women’s Forum held in Milan in October, LinkedIn EMEA Director Sandrine Chauvin stressed that women are significantly underrepresented in some of the areas that are set to increase in importance as the technological age advances and in the context of rapid pandemic stimulated digitization.

According to data collected by LinkedIn, she said, women currently represent 14.2% of the cloud computing workforce, for example, but “these roles – cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data, engineering – are precisely the crucial roles in the to shape all aspects of our life… we need the voices of women represented in this formative phase and this starts with women in STEM ”.

Women remain significantly underrepresented in the tech and digital sectors, with the gender gap often starting at an early stage of education. Ensuring that women and girls pursue work and studies in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) can lay the foundation for a much more inclusive and functional technology development process, say those working in the sector.

In addition to contributing to more equitable workplaces and education, they point out, ensuring the involvement of women at all stages of research, policy formulation and product development processes can ensure better and less biased results and implications. This is especially true when dealing with technologies such as AI that have a potentially far-reaching social impact.

It is also of great importance that women are included in all stages of product development, Berta Herrero Estalayo, senior EU public relations manager at Huawei, told listeners at the company’s Talent Summit in Helsinki last week.

Earlier this year, MEPs from the European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education called for a framework to “reduce gender, social and cultural bias” ahead of the law’s April launch. on the Commission’s artificial intelligence.

Ensuring strong representation of women from start to finish, Herrero Estalayo said, could also go a long way in reducing the presence of these biases in technology.

MEPs call for more regulation of AI discrimination

The European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education approved an opinion on 15 March calling for a framework to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) in order to “reduce gender, social or cultural bias in technology” and European Commission is expected to propose a legislative framework for the issue in April. This was reported by EURACTIV France.

However, efforts to expand women’s involvement in tech fields shouldn’t be focused solely on those with STEM backgrounds, added Ieva Šalnaitė, Lithuania’s representative at Huawei Summer School for Female Leadership in this year’s digital age.

Ensuring that women with humanities and social sciences skills are represented in policy making and product development should be a priority, she said, as their knowledge and experience are vital when it comes to interpreting and explaining data and predicting social implications of technology in ways that a purely scientific approach may not be able to do.

Despite a number of ongoing EU-level initiatives to broaden women’s participation in technology and innovation, progress remains slow.

According to the 2021 Digital Economy and Society Index (DESI), which measures EU countries’ progress on the Commission’s Digital Decade goals, one of which is to ensure convergence between men and women in both general and digital skills. women make up more than 25% of the ICT workforce in Bulgaria, Greece and Romania alone.

A particular focus of the Commission’s European Innovation Council (EIC) has been to encourage the funding of startups led by women who develop emerging technologies in order to address the gender gap in innovation, which sees only 15% of the startups founded or co-founded by women and significantly less venture capital funding to these firms than their male-led equivalents.

In July, as part of the Horizon Europe program, which funds research and innovation across the EU, the Commission launched the Women TechEU project, to inject advanced technology start-ups led by women with funding grants to the initial phase of 75,000 euros in an attempt to fill this gap.

Similarly, eligibility criteria for Horizon Europe funding have also been added to bridge the gap in research and innovation, meaning that in order to qualify for public funding, universities and research entities will be obliged to implement gender equality plans and to incorporate gender dimensions into scientific research.

Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth Mariya Gabriel told the G20 Forum that a multi-pronged approach would be needed to address the under-representation of women and the absence of gender.

“We don’t need big strategies, we need small actions with added value,” he said. “We need a critical mass of those actions.”

[Edited by Luca Bertuzzi and Benjamin Fox]

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