Welcome everyone. We are going to start with this presentation which was entitled Women In Tech Challenges In a highly imbalanced gender scenario. I am Giselle Bearde, I am a phd in Computer Science and engineering.And what you're going to see uh for the talk today is basically the chapter three of my book, which is going to be published by Oxford University Press First, I want to share with you an image that represents what are the artificial intelligence communities and perhaps will bring to your attention, the idea that or the fact that there is a highly imbalanced gender scenario.

You can see that there are a lot of uh male researchers while we have very few female researchers, I am standing in the middle of the picture with a yellow uh sweater and this conference was taking place in September 2018 in telecom Paris. So when I started my career in engineering and computer science, the scenario was similar to this what we see here, a lot of uh boys and very few girls. And for me, that was normal and I didn't see any problem about that. But with time, I think we need to change this scenario to make innovations more diverse and more inclusive because the researchers taking hypothesis may be developing uh innovations that are biased without being conscious of it. So because of A I having a large impact in our society, I think we need also to make teams more diverse and therefore help innovations to serve the wide majority of population. The percentage of female researchers in A I conferences uh is similar to what you already saw in the previous picture we have Taiwan as the country with the largest number of percentage of uh A I researchers followed by the Netherlands. But uh perhaps the average is around 89 10% 13%. So China and USA which are the countries with the largest number of researchers in A I have uh between 13 and 14%.

And perhaps if we, if we see the case of India, which is a large country and we are going to evaluate some other statistics uh from, for example, people studying uh information technology in A I participation, there is only 6% of female researchers in A I conferences. So this data is uh from a pool of 4000 researchers. Let's evaluate what happens in the graduate levels in 2017. Uh As we were analyzing India, we observed that for example, for uh IC T. So uh information and communication technologies, we have 50% of females graduating from these courses. We also have a large number of females in natural science and business and perhaps the less number in engineering uh in South Africa, we also have a similar trend. We have large number of females graduating in natural sciences and business. Uh But again, there is perhaps less interested in IC T and engineering still what happens. So it's interesting that we have a lot of graduates in IC T but very few participating in A I conferences in general in higher education and research around the world. Our statistics tell us that uh females uh in the bachelor and master's degrees are about 53%. But as we go higher in the letters of research and academia, we see only 42% of females and 28% of researcher, female researchers. So this trend is kind of a leaky pipeline where females start disappearing for the higher from the higher positions. In any case.

Uh These percentages around the world in research in general tell us that there is a wide variance for every region in Central Asia. We have almost the same amount of male and female researchers. Uh Likewise in Latin American and the Caribbean. And this trend uh goes down until for example, South Asia where we have only 19% of females working, but the world percentage is only 30%. And countries like, for example, North America and the Western Europe countries, uh they are around the average of the world 33%. This is a good news because it tells us that uh some environmental conditions are making that females are not uh in involved in research as males. And therefore, we can change that. Once again, analyzing the case study of India, we have uh the IC T sector, for example, and this is the entry level percentage of females. So there are 51% of females uh in IC T just similarly as we saw the number of graduate students, but then as they go in the higher letters, only 25% become managers and less than 1% become in the c suite um direction. This is uh sad but most of females working in IC T in India are younger than 30 years old and they are single.

The managers that hire them do not believe that they can manage their family activities with work and parenthood does not represent the problem for male managers. So there is uh some uh career problems uh due to maternity. Armenia is another interesting case study. Uh because researchers uh saw that there were lots of females engaged in computer science during the last three decades. And therefore they wanted to know why Armenians are studying computer science. So they made a survey and asked them if computer science, mathematics or engineering are suitable for women.

And the results are the following. Uh Most people surveyed thought that computer science and mathematics um or females thought that these fields are suitable for women. Well, not all of them believe that engineering would be. However, males were less positive about these questions.

They also asked Armenians uh in the field of computer science, do women receive the same recognition opportunities? And can they achieve the same success as men? And the results are the following? While females or 84% of females thought that females and males can achieve the same success.

Uh They recognize that there is not the same case in terms of opportunity and respect while males were less positive about it, and they very few or less than 58% thought that females could achieve the same success. And they also recognize that there is not the same opportunity and respect for them. Interestingly, managers of this study reported that males uh seem to be more creative and innovative than females, but they prefer to hire female workers because they are more loyal and they stay in the job they have who are males when they acquire some skills and demonstrate some success.

They move to another job with a higher salary. Also in the corporate world, women are less likely to be financed and their businesses are or stay smaller. It could be that treatments are more um uh work at home and therefore they cannot dedicate the same amount of hours as mail uh for their start ups or companies. But still, uh we can see that uh males receive more uh financing and they also better uh they get more uh financing for investors. So I was just wondering if the the human species is similar to the species of peacocks where females do not have the same tools or the same um uh advantages as males to impress in this case. Uh We have here um a phan and a peacock and uh of course, uh peacocks have this nice feather that are impressive when we see them. On the other case, we can also imagine that uh females have to deal with implicit association and bias. And uh from statistics and also from history, we recognize that there are large amounts of um males in the fields of engineering, business and leadership and there are less females or the number of females is quite low.

Therefore, our brain uh associates or implicitly associates engineering and business and leadership to males than rather than females. Therefore, it's important to analyze the legacy of the centuries. And we can uh explore that during the Roman Empire, women were educated in reading, writing, arithmetic, oratory, history and philosophy.

But when the Empire fall in 476 the Aristotelian vision was imposed uh that by nature, women is inferior to men. Many centuries passed. And in 1377 the degree of the University of Bologna prohibited the entrance of women to the university. And so between the 15th sorry, between the fifth and 15th centuries, those in charge of engineering works. Uh those related to construction machinery and war weaponry were exclusively made. And therefore, until today, we associate this kind of works to males. During many centuries, the main role of women were uh reproduction. They entered into uh family role from teenagers. And for about a period of 15 years, they um dedicated to having Children because kids were an asset. Um and they were also prohibited to go to higher education until there was a conference in New York that demanded women's rights in 1848. And then we see a important increase into females, studying uh medical sciences. So we talk about a health revolution and also this coincides with uh less infant infant mortality. So the problem was that there was a lack of the um female sex and uh hygiene norms and the entrance of females into medical sciences and universities helps to drive the health revolution.

So thanks to that, uh we have uh less infant mortality and our health conditions are increased. Since then, we can extrapolate this this event to our days thinking that we also need this amount of females into techno technology. But why should there be diversity in teams developing smart technologies? Well, we want higher productivity, we want to avoid bias systems and also because of ethics. Let's take the last point and imagine how is now the career in the technology sector. If we consider the left line for the majority and the right line for the minority. Uh the minority has to deal with implicit bias, pay, gap, maternity and repression. So I think if these obstacles fall down, more females can enter the race. And actually, if more females enter the race, these obstacles can also fall down. How does the structure of teams affect the result of innovations? Um There are various speech and recognition systems that operate better for male than female voices. Why is that? We just saw that in A I conferences or teams developing innovations, most of them are males and therefore perhaps the hypothesis that they are taking do not consider, for example, uh users different from them. These unconscious decisions make possible that uh innovations are biased, which is not good for our society. What do tech companies need to thrive? Of course, we need good leaders that understand things. And it has been seen that diversity has a strong impact on team performance.

If teams are well managed and they are homogeneous, they can reach certain level of performance. But if our teams are diverse already in the storming sessions, uh we can see a higher improve in productivity if these teams are well managed. So we need uh good managers, but we also need teams to be diverse. If we want more productivity, I just want to leave you with one question. And this question would be if we can create the future we want. Uh what feature will that be and how can we create it together? Uh Considering the current scenario and the current challenges. Just to end this short presentation, I'd like to share with you my linkedin profile as well as my website. And if there are any questions, uh I don't know if you have a microphone to raise them or we need to perhaps go to the chat. But uh I'll, I'll give you some minutes until you develop your first questions and we can start chatting and discussing these issues. Hm So I don't know if we have any questions in the chat. I don't see the chat. I'm trying to read the chat, but I don't know where I, I see the chat. I'm getting a lot of um requests for uh joining uh linkedin. So I assume most people have seen that I'm just going to share my screen again with uh uh my contacts. So thank you very much for contacting me.

There are a lot of uh interesting topics and um all that we have seen here will be published soon by Oxford University Press. I hope that we can change the way we are living today and the technology is available, not for um the majority that but for a diversity of teams. I don't know if someone is helping with this session so that we can move to the chat. But if there are no questions, then I'll thank you all. I don't know how to see the chat honestly, in any case, I thank you all and I hope we see you soon. Bye bye.