Cracking the code

UQ Vice-Chancellor and President's International Women's Day message 2023

Professor Deborah Terry AO

UQ Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Deborah Terry AO.

UQ Vice-Chancellor and President Professor Deborah Terry AO.

Humanity is undoubtedly in the midst of a really significant technological revolution at the moment.

Innovations linked to digitisation and automation are changing how we work, learn, communicate, socialise, access services, and even how we find our life partners.

What’s more, these changes are disrupting long-established business models, while simultaneously sparking entirely new industries – and new jobs.

The lessons of history teach us that this kind of technological revolution will have an immense influence on how our society functions long into the future.

It will create positive change and genuine social progress, but it also has the potential to exacerbate existing inequalities and reinforce systems of discriminatory practices for future generations.

The theme of this year’s International Women’s Day, Cracking the Code: Innovation for a gender equal future, is about ensuring that technology helps to advance gender equality globally and create a more inclusive society for all.

Of course, an important part of this is about combating discrimination and marginalisation by providing greater access to technology and education for women and girls.

However, another less recognised aspect of ensuring that innovation assists gender equity (as opposed to hindering it) involves tackling the inherent gender bias that is often embedded in technology itself.

The subtle gender bias that’s evident in some of our emerging tech-enabled systems and services is the inevitable result of the fact that STEM fields and technology professions remain male dominated.

I’m not suggesting that these systems are consciously or deliberately designed to be biased towards men (at the expense of women), but rather that they often contain an inherent gender bias simply because they are heavily influenced by the values and lived experience of those who develop the technology.

And the unfortunate reality in Australia is that women still make up only around 28% of the STEM workforce.

The representation of women at senior levels in most STEM industries is as low as 23%. And women comprise only 18% of the highest academic seniority level across STEM research and teaching fields.

The driving forces behind these statistics are many and varied.

For a start, STEM fields are often – and falsely – viewed as ‘masculine’ and teachers and parents often underestimate girls’ abilities in maths and science from a young age.

As a result, fewer women go on to study and work in STEM fields, and so their workplaces tend to be less flexible and perpetuate male-dominated cultures that are not supportive of, or appealing to, women.

And because fewer women work in STEM, girls have fewer role models to inspire their interest in these fields.

And so the cycle unfortunately repeats itself.

Professor Deborah Terry AO with UQ staff

Professor Deborah Terry AO with UQ staff members

Professor Deborah Terry AO with UQ staff members

Some of these forces, like establishing more flexible and inclusive policies in STEM workplaces, are relatively straightforward to address. Others, like shifting cultural perceptions of maths and science as ‘masculine’ fields, will take much longer to overhaul.

However, it is so important that we do. Because ensuring a gender diverse STEM workforce prevents biases in these fields and in the products and services they produce.

When products and services – such as tools, vehicles, technologies, or medical treatments – are designed almost exclusively by men, their design often ignores the lived experiences of women and, instead, reflects the attitudes that men hold about women.

For example, when crash test dummies for cars were introduced in the 1950s and until very recently, they were based on the 50th percentile male – significantly taller and heavier than an average woman.

And even though female crash test dummies are used today, they are still sometimes just scaled-down versions of the male dummy – despite the fact that women have on average, different muscle mass distribution, lower bone density and different vertebrae spacing.

In another example, a recent investigation undertaken by The Guardian newspaper, in partnership with the Pulitzer Centre, found that the AI algorithms operating to exclude potentially pornographic images from social media platforms have a gender bias.

The investigation found that these algorithms consistently identify images of women’s bodies as more ‘racy’ than comparable images of male bodies. It also found that, because of this, the algorithms may have disproportionately suppressed the reach of images featuring women’s bodies, including important health messages, such as a demonstration of how to perform a breast self-examination.

The article explains that the likely reason for the gender bias embedded in this technology is that the algorithms were probably trained by a majority of straight men.

These examples speak to the need for women to be in the room when these decisions are being made – and the vital importance of having more women studying STEM and working in technology-related jobs.

Because if we’re serious about creating a world that is free from gender discrimination, we need more women involved in laying the foundations for the AI which will inevitably dictate so many aspects of our lives in the future.

And to go one step further, if we’re serious about eliminating discrimination in all its ugly forms, we need a STEM workforce that is as diverse as the society we live in – one which, for example, also reflects the LGBTQIA+ community, as well as different cultures, ethnicities and languages.

Making sure, for example, that voice recognition technologies recognise all voices.

Or ensuring that medical diagnostic tools that utilise AI are programmed to help identify disease in all bodies.

Or that personal protective equipment and safety features are designed to fit people of all shapes, sizes, and proportions.

We are entering a new age of technological development. And given this, it is vitally important that we seize the opportunity to embed gender equity as a feature of the digitally enabled systems and frameworks that will continue to have such a heavy influence on our society.

This International Women’s Day, let’s champion the unique skills and knowledge of women who are working in STEM.

So, together, we can leverage the transformative power of inclusive innovation, and crack the code to gender equality.

Professor Deborah Terry AO
Vice-Chancellor and President