The Age of Artificial Intelligence: Recognizing Gender Bias in AI

Published on Feb. 6, 2025, at 2:24 p.m.
by Abby Cope.

Artificial intelligence has become a force to be reckoned with. Whether it’s in the workplace, the classroom or just for one’s personal use, it is prominent in people’s day-to-day lives. According to a study by Slack’s Workforce Lab, 81% of respondents claim that artificial intelligence has prompted them to become more productive and produce higher quality work in their job field.

With the release of platforms like ChatGPT in 2019, artificial intelligence broadened its reach to over 200 million more users than prior to that point. While on the one hand this can be seen as a vital tool to help students and employees perfect their work, it can also be viewed as a crutch from relying too heavily on its abilities rather than one’s own.

Dr. Brian Butler, dean of The University of Alabama’s College of Communication and Information Sciences, said, “You can use AI to write a standard class paper, but when you do you don’t learn much. Most likely the paper won’t be very good (the professor won’t be fooled). AI alone doesn’t write ‘A’ papers. There is a fine line between AI as a helpful tool and AI as a damaging distraction.”

While artificial intelligence has been praised for its helpful abilities, like any other technological resource, it has its fatal flaws and bugs — a rising one being gender bias. Popular artificial intelligence platforms, such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Duet, are generative platforms. This means that they learn and retain information to improve their responses based on user input.

Conveniently, these platforms are also the ones with the most issues related to gender bias. Natural language processing systems, or NLPs, are found to associate certain words with specific genders. Something as seemingly gender neutral as job titles are found to have this bias, with “nurse” being marked as a female noun while “doctor” or “scientist” is marked as male.

Even home-based virtual assistants, such as Alexa, Cortana or Siri, are automatically set as women’s voices. This implies that women are there to always be helpful and answer questions as needed, which is not an example to be setting in the 21st century.

To fix this problem, we have to face it head on. Studies from UNESCO found that 80% of authors at conferences pertaining to artificial intelligence were men, while only 18% were women. It is vital to have an increased female presence in the field of artificial intelligence to gain proper female representation.

Artificial intelligence is not going anywhere. Though it has only risen in popularity in recent years, its reach is one that has taken other platforms decades to attain. In order to ensure that going forward we will have equality in our educational resources, we must watch what we say and input into these systems. AI is always listening and learning; let’s make sure we teach it properly so it can do the same for us.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]