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St Hugh’s hosts inaugural annual AI lecture

St Hugh’s College hosted the inaugural annual lecture on AI entitled: “Feminism Confronts AI: The Gender Relations of Digitalisation”, which was delivered by Professor Judy Wajcman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute.

This talk examined the gender relations of digitalisation, with a particular focus on AI as the most contemporary expression of this. While there is increasing recognition that technologies are both a reflection and crystallisation of society, Judy argued that there is still insufficient focus on the ways in which gendered power relations are embedded in technoscience. This is as much the case with AI as it was with previous waves of technological change. The systemic under-representation of women in the AI ecosystem poses the risk of encoding and amplifying existing patterns of gender inequities. Yet diversifying the workforce is not merely a matter of increasing the number of women and people from marginalised groups, but of achieving an upheaval in the culture and politics of tech companies.

‘We were delighted to have Professor Wajcman deliver this inaugural lecture at St Hugh’s, and it was wonderful to see such a multidisciplinary audience, both in person and online,’ said Dr. Nikolaus Vertovec, St Hugh’s Career Development Fellow in Artificial Intelligence. ‘The talk highlighted critical issues around gender inequities in digitalization and AI, the history of feminist responses, and the evolution of workforce divisions. This has sparked an incredibly important interdisciplinary conversation at St Hugh’s on the responsibility we share in designing and deploying AI.’

To watch the lecture in full please click on the link below: