by ANDI ZEISLER
New technology has always been used against women. Why should we trust artificial intelligence not to be?
It’s here. It’s there. Everywhere you look, AI.
Each Google search returns a lengthy AI summary before providing links to relevant search results. Chatbots pop up as soon as you go online to make flight reservations or pay a credit card bill. Start writing an email and an AI prompt appears right in the middle of a sentence: Hi! Looks like you’re writing an email! Can I help? Hmmm? What about now?
A world in which we can use AI is quickly becoming one in which we have little choice in the matter, and apparently, women in particular need to step it up. The language used in recent reports like “Women are avoiding AI. Will their careers suffer?” and “Women are lagging behind on AI but they can catch up” are instructive: “Falling behind” men in AI adoption, women are “reluctant” to get on board and “in denial” about AI’s “all-consuming importance.” But the encouragement toward more widespread adoption ignores one reason women might be side-eyeing AI omnipresence: The virtual revolution has repeatedly made them targets of real-world aggression. Advertisement:
Caution ? technophobia
The recent reporting on women and AI starts from the thesis that women aren’t using AI at the same rates as men are, and that is bad. But why is it bad? There’s no indication that women are refusing to comply with the mandated use of AI tools; they’re just slower to choose them. In not specifying what men are accomplishing with AI that women aren’t, these pieces can only imply that AI is important because a lot of men are using it. But a narrative in which women must catch up to men or lose out serves a specific purpose: It reifies existing stereotypes about women as not naturally interested in STEM fields.
Dr. Kerry McInerney, an AI ethicist at the University of Cambridge who co-hosts the podcast “The Good Robot,” points out that this narrative also conflates caution and technophobia. “Critically questioning technology is not the same as being anti-technology,” she says. “Because of a wide range of gender stereotypes we consume from childhood on, it might be that there is a gendered reluctance to adopt these tools when they’re very new.” But, she says, this doesn’t mean it’s forever: Smart home devices are among the products that quickly become normalized for people of all genders.
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