Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley

by Emily Chang

Examples of how technology has failed women play out every day, leaving the tech industry in danger of continuing to repeat the same wrongs. For example, Bell pointed out that the microphone I was using to record our conversation was originally optimized to pick up male voices, leading women to sound distorted. Facial recognition technology works almost perfectly for light-skinned men but has extremely high error rates for darker-skinned women. In one startling Reuters story, Amazon recruiting technology was unintentionally programmed to reject the résumés of female candidates. The AI in the company’s résumé-sorting program had “learned” from the past data that male candidates were preferable, simply because most of the résumés submitted came from men. It penalized résumés containing the word “women’s,” including those from candidates who had attended women’s colleges. Human resources executives have high hopes for AI to take bias out of the hiring process; the problem is, the AI itself is already biased.