Artificial Intelligence: Breaking Barriers

“That’s your fault for dressing up like that, you can’t blame him.”

I was 15 when it first happened.

My troubles were usually related to school work, friendships and time management until that point. Pretty normal highschool stuff. I was on student council, I had a passion for coding and I was figuring myself out.

I think when I heard about women’s rights protests and movements, I always envisioned the third world countries you always hear so much about. The problem always seemed so far away, that I never thought it would impact me directly. I was living a decent life in a first world country, women’s struggles don’t exist here, right?

Oh, how wrong I was.

You can imagine my shock when I got sexually harassed by one of my close male friends and later badmouthed for the same thing. At that moment, I felt violated, gross, and shaken up.

I’m not sure what impacted me more, the fact that I was harmed or one of my best friends telling me it was partially justified because of my “flirty nature”.

This was a show of victim-blaming at its finest, used to justify and rationalize actions when people don’t want to be wrong. But, to my young and impressionable mind, it seemed like the absolute truth. Problems were happening to me, it makes sense for the reason to be my fault too.

After all, if I changed myself, maybe the problems would change too.

But, the problems weren’t to do with me in the first place. It was to do with factors outside of my control that I’d been forced to take responsibility to make people swayed by patriarchy feel correct.

The once far away problem with women’s equality resurfaced in my mind, closer than I had ever thought of it being. I was one of the 85% of women, nothing but a labeled statistic to show the violation someone had caused me.

I was the result of a broken system, structured to make me feel like I had to be the root of problems others caused.

I suppose that’s when it really hit me, the world is unfair, and I just got a taste of it. Advocacy is great to some extent, and it’s fantastic that people know more about discrepancies within the workforce (especially things that can be changed with different mindsets). The problem is taking action.

We want things to change, but we don’t have mechanisms to make that work in a scalable manner. The idea of advocacy works to some extent but is somewhat hopeless without action

OR… do we?

Here’s the thing: discrimination in the workplace doesn’t solely impact the way people themselves feel, but how others treat them. This looks like getting accepted into jobs, or

Make fair employment decisions. Organizations should verify their employment decision processes are free of bias by asking themselves: — Is there statistical evidence of bias in our decisions (hiring, compensation, promotion, etc.)? — Are the datasets on which predictive models are based limited to (or dominated by) certain groups? — Are features/predictors in the models highly correlated with factors such as age, gender or race? AI solutions can help organizations avoid bias in HR decisions.

For those of you out there struggling, AI might solve a part of sexism, but the rest is up to you dear reader.

We have been told that nobody would ever take us seriously because of the way that we look and the way that we dress and the way that we present ourselves. When we are shunned for liking a part of our identity and expression, we are forced to believe that the want to be original and the want to be respected are diametrically opposed