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How to get girls to engage in scientific studies

by admin

“All human beings have three lives: public, private and secret,” he said Gabriel Garcia Marquez. But how true is it? It’s not just mobile phones and apps that come straight into our lives, it is artificial intelligence that surprises us, it scares us and that we use more and more often to identify emotions.

This relatively new area of ​​research, Emotion Recognition Technology (Ert) is growing rapidly, although like other forms of biometric recognition system, it is encoded with racial and gender bias. Many companies use ERT to test customer reactions to their products and check their satisfaction. Human resources use it for hiring, police use it to identify possible criminals, airport security uses it. In short, everyone uses it.

China, which in the past year introduced a new facial recognition technology which can identify faces even when wearing a mask, uses ERT albeit with a slightly lower accuracy rate, for counter-terrorism, urban security and to manage health. Still, the recent documentario Coded Bias di Netflix confirmed that most facial recognition systems cannot accurately detect skin color, reinforcing prejudices against people of color.

We fail to identify faces correctly and we expect that technology recognizes emotions of a person? Do we really want to delegate to a system to catalog our humanity and depend on “its” selective decision?

Our personal and work lives become increasingly constrained by stereotypical and gender-biased algorithms, therefore technology risks being an adversary for women. We asked ourselves why? It is indisputable: prejudices are an inevitable feature of life, we are all, some more, some less, unwittingly discriminating. However, social preconceptions can be reflected and amplified by artificial intelligence in a dangerous and unstoppable way.

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In 1959 Marvin Minsky, the father of artificial intelligence, meets in Darmouth with other colleagues to try to write the rules of a “thinking machine”. In proposal to obtain the funds of the study, it says: “We think significant progress can be made … if a carefully selected group of scientists work together for one summer.”

The scientists who washed us are 10 and they are only men, with the result that the foundations of the imagined system, that is of the artificial mind, is male-oriented and that technology discriminates against women, sometimes in an embarrassing and often dangerous way . And if AI had also been created for women, what would it be like today?

In 2018, according to i data from the World Economic Forum, women occupied only 22% of global AI jobs, while men accounted for 78%. The numbers haven’t changed much. The challenge is that girls do not yet have the confidence to pursue well-paid careers in science and technology, despite their educational achievements often being better than boys.

Equal opportunities start at school and not, as she says Plato in his ideal model of state, in which, in order to govern, women must lose their feminine characteristics and renounce being mothers.

You can be either a mother-leader or a mother-scientist, like the president of the European commission Ursula Von Der Layen with seven children, astrophysicist Amalia Ercoli Finzi with five and Italian astronaut Samantha Cristoforetti, who after spending 200 days in space as part of the Expedition 42/43 crew on the International Space Station gave birth to her daughter, Kelsey Amal.

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Unfortunately, adolescents lose the scientific interest they have as children because they are demotivated by few professional opportunities. Girls must be helped with facts, they must have the same development potential and the necessary support if they decide to start a family. Prejudices are not only defeated with work tables, are treated and resolved with the participation, with the presence, with the contribution of women because gender inequality is an obstacle to the sustainable progress of the planet.

We need to change the narrative and help them in their choice. Not only do girls and girls need to be motivated and supported to take a scientific and technological orientation. They have to be encouraged, they have to feel part of the change from an early age.

More than a choice of studies, they must feel it as a must, awakening what distinguishes the woman in the moment of crisis, from the way she solves problems and makes decisions, to how she manages to carry out multiple activities at the same time, from how she manages people to feel greater empathy towards similar people.

Let us make them responsible. Technology must be created, tested and used without gender discrimination. For females, choosing science and innovation is no longer an opportunity, it is an urgent need. Simone de Beauvoir used to say that “a woman is not born, one becomes one”. Here, let’s make our little girls and our girls become women. Women who change the world, however.

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