The Power, Opportunities, Risks, and Challenges of AI and GenAI for Women: A Reflection on International Women's Day

As we celebrate International Women's Day, it is an opportune moment to reflect on the power, opportunities, risks, and challenges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its advanced iteration, Generative AI (GenAI), present for women. This day serves as a reminder of the? achievements of women and progress made towards gender equality, while also highlighting the work that remains. In this context, it is crucial to examine how AI and GenAI can both empower women, but also inadvertently perpetuate gender biases, and affect citizens’ fundamental rights.?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its advanced iteration, Generative AI (GenAI), have emerged as powerful tools with the potential to revolutionize various aspects of our lives. While these technologies offer immense opportunities for progress, it is crucial to recognize and address the risks and challenges they pose, particularly for girls and women. (Gen)AI can inadvertently perpetuate biases and have harmful effects. Deepfakes, for example, disproportionately affect women. It is essential to acknowledge these risks and work towards mitigating them. This article explores the positive and negative considerations of GenAI and AI for girls and women, highlighting potential recommendations and best practices to ensure a fair and inclusive future.

The Power and Opportunities:

GenAI and AI present numerous opportunities for women, empowering them in various domains. These technologies can help bridge gender gaps by developing IT systems and technologies that do not perpetuate gender stereotypes and provide unbiased decision-making processes. For instance, AI algorithms can assist in reducing gender biases that lead to discriminatory practices against women in the workplace (e.g. recruitment and promotion), or in accessing private and public services and benefits (e.g. bank loans, insurance, housing).

Moreover, GenAI has the potential to revolutionize healthcare by tailoring treatments and diagnoses specifically for women and men. By analyzing vast amounts of data, AI can identify patterns and provide personalized healthcare solutions, addressing gender-specific health concerns more effectively.

Risks and Challenges:

Despite the potential benefits, GenAI and AI also pose significant risks and challenges for women. One prominent concern is the rise of deepfake technology, which disproportionately affects women (particularly non-consensual deepfake pornography). Deepfakes, manipulated videos or images produced using AI techniques, lead to privacy violations, harassment, and reputational damage. This highlights the urgent need to enforce robust legal frameworks (like the AI Act), develop technological solutions to combat deepfakes and contribute to the elimination of technology-facilitated violence against girls and women.

Another challenge lies in the potential perpetuation of gender biases and stereotypes within AI algorithms. If not carefully designed,trained, validated and tested, algorithms can inadvertently reinforce existing gender biases, leading to discriminatory outcomes. It is crucial to rely on relevant, representative, error-free and complete datasets during the development of AI systems to mitigate such biases and promote fairness.

Recommendations and Best Practices:

To harness the power of GenAI and AI for women while mitigating risks, several recommendations and best practices should be considered:

1. Ethical and human-centric AI Development: developers and researchers must prioritize ethical considerations, including fairness, transparency, human oversight, and accountability, throughout the entire AI development process. This requires diverse and inclusive teams, rigorous testing, and continuous monitoring to identify and rectify biases.

2. Education and Awareness: promoting digital literacy and awareness about the potential, the opportunities, but also about risks and challenges of GenAI and AI is essential. By raising awareness, upskilling and reskilling women, we can empower them to protect themselves, as well as to seek fulfilling careers in this field.

3. Collaboration and Regulation: governments, tech companies, and civil society organizations should collaborate to establish and enforce comprehensive regulations and guidelines for GenAI and AI. Besides enforcing the AI Act, guidelines should address issues such as data privacy, consent, and the responsible use of AI technologies, ensuring the protection of women's rights and promoting gender equality. Mainstreaming human rights and gender equality into existing or new technology-related legal and policy frameworks is also key. We know that this is a very difficult task as these very important considerations need to be embedded as such that it wouldn’t slow down innovation nor the competitiveness of Europe on this matter.

4. Inclusive Data Collection: To avoid perpetuating biases and stereotypes, it is crucial to collect and make use of diverse and representative datasets during the training, validation and testing of AI algorithms. This includes ensuring gender balance in development teams and considering intersectionality to account for the experiences of women from different backgrounds.

Conclusion:

This is a topic that is close to our values at PwC. PwC is known for its commitment to diversity and inclusion, including gender equality. PwC has been actively involved in promoting gender diversity and addressing biases in AI and technology. We have published reports and research on the topic, highlighting the importance of gender considerations in AI development and implementation. Additionally, PwC has been involved in initiatives and partnerships aimed at advancing gender equality in the tech industry and has done written reports on Women in AI to support and empower women in technology-related fields. But foremost we pay a lot of attention to how we address the opportunities and challenges of AI from a gender perspective? in everything we do. GenAI and AI offer immense power and opportunities for women, but they also come with risks and challenges that must be addressed. By encouraging girls and women to pursue tech studies and careers, acknowledging the potential harms of AI, promoting its ethical and human-centric development, respecting the law, and implementing robust guidelines and standards, we can harness the full potential of these technologies while safeguarding girls’ and women's fundamental rights. It is through collective efforts and a commitment to inclusivity from our community of solvers that we can create a future where GenAI and AI truly benefit all members of society in full respect of their fundamental rights.