Lip service is not something she is satisfied with, as Sheila Beladinejad made clear in her lecture at the Stuttgart trade fair. “5 Key Factors That Can Attract Investors to an AI company” is the title of her lecture. In the audience are young founders and researchers from the computer sciences who are thinking about founding a start-up. They are hanging on the lips of the woman who has been active in the tech industry and advising investors for more than 20 years. The fate of a start-up often depends on their judgment. In addition to a viable business plan and choosing the right AI methods, Beladinejad also has “lack of diversity as a high risk” on her slides. “Don’t overlook this,” she says, looking sternly into the audience.
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Silicon Valley is a “white men’s club” and is therefore very symptomatic of the representation of women in the tech industry and in science. The new issue of MIT Technology Review is exactly about this gender gap. The new issue is available from November 10th. in stores and from November 9th. Can be easily ordered in the heise shop. Highlights from the magazine:
A team that consists almost entirely of white men is a risk factor, she warns. Beladinejad is not a women’s rights activist. She would like to continue to focus primarily on artificial intelligence and robotics, because these are the topics that actually concern her. She worked in the telecommunications industry, among other things, and if you ask more detailed questions, you’ll hear a lot of technical terms flying around.
There is already a gap in training
With her expertise in the field of AI, the Canadian finally founded a company: she analyzes start-ups for potential investors and puts them through their paces. Does the concept work? How exactly is AI used? Are people sitting in the right places?
And the right people in these right positions are far too rarely women. This gap arises during training. According to the European Commission’s report “She figures 2021 – Gender in Research and Innovation”, significantly fewer women than men are doing doctorates, especially in certain subjects: in the natural sciences, for example, it is only 38.4 percent, in mathematics and statistics 32.5 percent, in information and communication technology 20.8 percent and in engineering and engineering professions 27 percent. “Between 2015 and 2018, there was little progress in increasing the proportion of women among doctoral graduates in these narrow STEM fields,” the commission writes.
Women are less likely to be employed as scientists
In general, the proportion of university graduates in the EU is balanced between genders, according to the study, but women are still employed as scientists and engineers less often than men. And there are also significantly fewer female entrepreneurs than male founders: in the areas of science and technology as well as information and communication technology, less than a quarter of self-employed people are female. “Given the strategic importance of the technology industry to the EU economy, this data shows that greater efforts are needed to increase women’s participation in this sector.”
More visibility is one of the things that Beladinejad believes is needed now. When she’s not encouraging fellow female activists, she speaks at conferences – and anyone who tries to deal with women’s issues on a side stage or in a small hall, she loudly demands the main stage. She recently attended a conference on AI organized by the digital association Bitkom, she reports. Politicians and government officials gave great presentations about why diversity is important for transparent and trustworthy AI. But when she spoke to the men in suits afterwards and asked them to specifically support women, one said she was wrong because he was from the Ministry of Economic Affairs, she reports: “He said: Go to the Ministry for Women, Children and Senior Citizens , we care about innovation.” Another German authority told her that German women had every opportunity and could become roboticists, “but they just don’t want to” – and they didn’t want to force them either.
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