Shelley, welcome.
Is the rise of disruptive technologies, particularly
AI, impacting on gender equality?
Well, you know, listen, I think that there's bias in tech,
and especially in AI.
And I think one of the things
that we have to work really hard on is how do we give more
visibility?
We have to make the invisible visible.
And right now,
one of the things that we're working on is the algorithm for equality.
And, you know, we coined that phrase, because we definitely have to get
some of the junk out of the trunk and put more women in AI
and flood the internet with more profiles of women.
It may sound like a really obvious question, but why does it matter?
Why is that important? Why do you need to do that?
Well, there's so many great
women in tech and we're just not profiling them enough.
And I think we've been sharing the voice of men
so often that the women are just not rising to the top.
And if we don't put more profiles of women, especially, look at Wikipedia.
There are so few women in Wikipedia and so few stories shared that
if you search CEO, you get white men
when and there are so few CEOs as women.
So we really have to tell more stories and we have to put them out there
more and profile them more so that there's not the bias
in AI. We’ll get onto that in a second.
But are we getting better?
It’s a very different scene from when I was young
and thinking about what I wanted to do for a career.
We have a long way to go.
We do have a long way to go, and I think that we need
to put more women in
and get to equal before we can share equal voice.
So let's talk about the impact that having that kind of gender disparity
has on the actual tech, the creation of the tech,
because it surely has an influence of bias?
Well, bias in, bias out.
And even think about a lot of tech development.
I mean, you're not wearing high heels today.
Neither am I.
But I mean, think about escalators.
I don't think those were made
by women.
I mean, my heels get caught all the time. You know how dangerous that is?
Or think about airbags in cars.
Number one fatality is women.
I mean, they were made by men on male dummies.
Or think about seatbelts.
I mean, when you put that seatbelt on, is that comfortable on your boobs?
Not comfortable. No.
You know, so I mean, everything that. We need
diversity in innovation on every level, because,
I think that's why we talk about diversity and innovation, not just to have
diversity for diversity’s sake, but diversity is good for business.
So what should leaders be doing then to further gender equality?
We should be
hiring diversity in every single level.
And it's not just diversity because it's the right thing to
do, diversity is good for business.
Shelley, thank you so much. Thank you so much.
That was fun.