CSW68 | Interactive Dialogue on the Emerging Issue

Women At The Table / <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms  Caitlin Kraft-Buchman – 22 March 2024

We need a pro-social AI designed with intention, that has  inclusion at the core, to create new opportunities & innovative correction of inequities.

We call for a gender transformative AI future that creates ecosystems that weave the digital, and the green, and the care work transitions into an indivisible, interdependent framework. 

Therefore, we must:

1. Use  gender responsive public procurement to jumpstart new value creation, invented and owned by women and girls, expanding definitions of ‘expertise’ so that  those with lived experience, and the communities that are affected by technologies  can influence the design, deployment and control  of those new technologies.

2. Insist the public sector experiment and pilot AI that allocates 21st century social protection,  incentives, subsidies, and scholarships where women & girls have traditionally been left behind.                              

3. Mandate  use of Algorithmic Impact Assessments that include integrated Gender, Human Rights and Environmental Impact Assessments together, both ex ante and continuously throughout the life cycle of each system. 

4. Enshrine the public’s right to know the AI systems that impact their lives – beginning with  continuous consent, and ending with contestability. 

5. Build  capacity through mandatory training for any individual who uses AI-informed decision-making in their work, or develops it, or inputs data into it.

6. Construct new quality unbiased datasets for public use, led by the UN.

7. Create research funds to explore impacts of AI on the lives of women and ALL those traditionally excluded from rules making and decision taking.

8. To accomplish this – a stand alone section on gender in the Global Digital Compact (GDC) is necessary
9. And a meaningful influential seat for civil society in all discussions going forward.

This work could re-situate women & girls and historically marginalized populations from the dark edges to the bright center of technology creation and control, to create more inclusive frameworks that benefit all – going further than the goal to leave no one behind – to one that lifts everyone up- in human dignity.