What Would Mary Wollstonecraft Do About Gender Bias in AI and the Tech Pay Gap
If the philosopher and writer Mary Wollstonecraft lived in our digital age, her fight for equality would find a new battlefield: the gender bias embedded in artificial intelligence algorithms and the persistent pay gap in the tech industry. Her method, far from theoretical, would be eminently practical and transformative. 🧠⚖️
A Manifesto for the Algorithmic Age
Wollstonecraft would not waste time on abstract debates. Her first action would be to draft a contemporary manifesto, a "Vindication of the Rights of the Algorithm," to publicly denounce how human prejudices are transferred and amplified in machine systems. This document would lay the ethical foundations to demand accountability in developing artificial intelligence.
Pillars of her manifesto:- Expose how historical training datasets perpetuate gender and racial stereotypes.
- Demand that companies be accountable for the logic used by their automated systems to make decisions.
- Propose a framework for coding fairness as a fundamental parameter, not as an optional add-on.
Illustration for the machines, before their opaque logic darkens the future we build.
Found an Organization to Audit and Correct
After the manifesto, Wollstonecraft would proceed to organize an open-source foundation. This entity would function as an ethical counterweight to AI development, focusing on two fronts: curating databases and auditing critical-use algorithms for free and publicly.
Key functions of the foundation:- Process and clean massive datasets to remove harmful associations before a model learns them.
- Audit systems for recruitment, credit granting, and facial recognition, publishing detailed reports showing discrimination failures.
- Use public scrutiny as a driver to force companies to rectify and adopt more equitable practices.
Attack the Pay Gap from the Systems
To address the inequality in tech salaries, her strategy would be systemic. She would understand that it is necessary to attack the causes in the systems, not just in human resources policies. Her foundation would create bias-free AI tools to evaluate candidates and review compensations, offering companies an objective alternative.
At the same time, by educating on how biases are embedded in technology, she would empower professionals to demand equity with data-based arguments. Her legacy would evolve from defending women's rights to defending justice in the code that governs more and more aspects of our lives. Her action would demonstrate that closing the gap requires intervening in the very design of the tools we use to organize work and society. 🔧📊