We Must Fix AI’s Diversity Problem

A lack of diverse staff is creating racist, sexist and classist intelligence

Pepper, a white robot developed by Softbank Robotics. Photo by Alex Knight on Unsplash.

Our technology industry has a diversity problem. This in itself is not a new issue. But the subset of our industry working on artificial intelligence (AI) has a particularly acute diversity problem, and it is having a negative impact on the lives of millions of people, all around the world.

Since 2014, Information is Beautiful have maintained a visualization of the published diversity statistics for some of the world’s largest technology companies. Despite the 2017 US population being 51 percent female, at that time Nvidia only employed 17 percent female staff, Intel and Microsoft 26 percent, Dell 28 percent, and Google, Salesforce and YouTube 31 percent. This reporting also didn’t account for those that identify as non-binary or transgender, nor the fact that the diversity gap widens at the most senior levels of companies: a 2018 report found that only 10 percent of tech executives are female.

The diversity problem goes beyond just gender. Racial diversity in technology is poor, and even less is being done about it. Consider “colorless diversity”: a phenomena where the industry is not investing equally in addressing the imbalance of people of color. In 2015, Erica Joy Baker highlighted that “whether by…