2021

Women at the Table have been asked to brief the CEDAW Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women experts on on artificial intelligence and algorithms and women’s rights and gender equality.

The briefing follows on from our brief to the European Commission Gender Equality Unit in the spring. We hope to make a clear case to CEDAW about the outsized impact biased artificial intelligence is having and will continue exponentially on the lives of women and girls in every corner of the world.

The Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute Geneva + London-based think tank Global Policy Insight and AI Policy Lab series on AI & SDGs

Panel with:

Ivana Bartoletti, Co-Founder, Women Leading in AI Network; Visiting Policy Fellow, Oxford Internet Institute

Lowri Angharad Rees, UN Women

Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, Women at the Table / <A+> Alliance

Jérôme Duberry, Research Associate & Lecturer, Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy

with Youth Leaders and Youth Professionals (YLYP) of the Committee on the Status of Women (CSW)

Speakers:

• Raesetje Sefala, AI Researcher at Mila (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute) and a computer science Master's student at Wits University, Johannesburg. Her research focuses on creating ground truth datasets and using machine learning to study spatial segregation in South Africa, post-Apartheid.
• Sofia Kypraiou, Data Science Master's student at École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. She is working on her master’s thesis exploring and enhancing a practical toolbox for AI and Human rights.
• Joana Varon is affiliated to the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, Executive Directress and Creative Chaos Catalyst at Coding Rights (Brazil), and Technology and Human Rights Fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy from Harvard Kennedy School.

Moderator: Caitlin Kraft-Buchman, CEO/Founder, Women at the Table, co-founder <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms

The G-app: Gender Gap Application measures on which topics women are speaking, for how long, in which capacity and with what authority.

International Organisations provide the space and infrastructure for deciding the direction of the international community. Ensuring that a plurality of voices are heard is key for these decisions to have legitimacy. But how is this plurality measured? Do we understand the duration of time or the subjects on which women speak in international fora? Do we understand in which capacity women speak: as decision makers, as experts, or experientially? It's not sufficient for women merely to be present, or even to speak in the conference chamber, they must also have influence in outcomes.

Why and where can algorithms produce inequality outcomes? Why and where can algorithms be gender biased? How can a human rights-based approach be applied to computer algorithms that engage, reason about, and make decisions on people?

A workshop to further integrate concepts of intersectionality and bring work to the next step to draw clear lines from human rights principles to code, with a unique blend of human rights law and data science.

A collaboration between Women at the Table, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, & EPFL.

A first in a series of workshops.