Future-skilling girls for an AI world
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo Illustration: Axios Visuals; Photo: Courtesy of Tara Chklovski
Telling young women they should "just learn to code" is "misguided" advice in the AI era, according to the founder of a global nonprofit aimed at bringing gender parity to tech.
The big picture: AI systems reflect the biases and perspectives of their creators, and shaping fair and inclusive AI systems will require empowering generations of young women to build them, Technovation founder Tara Chklovski argues.
- That means going beyond just getting more girls into the STEM education pipeline, and helping more girls and women play bigger roles in building the new technology.
Chklovski earned her bachelor's degree in physics in India and then came to the U.S. to pursue a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.
- Chklovski said she was inspired by old Popular Mechanics magazines and wanted to be a pilot, like her father.
- After finding herself to be the only woman in internships and on engineering teams, Chklovski decided to stop pursuing her Ph.D. and focus all of her time on addressing the gender and racial gap in STEM.
- In 2016 Technovation pivoted to providing skills, mentorship and opportunities for girls in AI.
Between the lines: Chklovski has seen how quickly tech evolves, but she doesn't worry about upskilling girls with certificates and coding languages that quickly become outdated.
- The problems that AI needs to solve are harder, Chklovski told Axios, because "we have many more people. We have done more damage to the planet. There's a lot more information, a lot more inequality."
The "just learn to code" attitude of the last decade has become obsolete, she said, "because, honestly, you could probably use ChatGPT to build the code."
- Instead, she encourages Technovation's mentors to focus on skills that have stood the test of time: problem-solving, collaboration, ambition and courage.
The best way to prepare students for the future, Chklovski said, is to help them find a problem that they want to solve and then help them apply the most current tools to solve it.
How it works: Technovation is a free program for girls starting as young as 8.
- Participants work with volunteer mentors and parents to find a problem in their community, and build an AI project or a mobile web app to address it.
- Chklovski says she's especially proud of the regional pitch events that Technovation holds around the world.
- "We gather the local community to come and to hear these girls get up on stage and talk about their ideas," she says, and that "changes the way they perceive girls and women," "especially the father, especially the males in the community."
Case in point: The girls in the program implemented AI in different projects aimed at helping people with Alzheimer's and anxiety disorders and enhancing women's safety and access to sex education.
- One team of girls from a remote village in Kenya dealing with gun violence created an app that uses AI to detect gunshots and immediately notify first responders.
What's next: Chklovski says Technovation started with an age group of 8 to 18, but as they kept in touch with their alumnae, they realized the women needed continued support as they entered the workforce. So they expanded the age range to 24.
- "It's not enough to just say, 'Oh, now that you have a tech job, you're OK,'" Chklovski said. "We want to make sure we're providing this whole ecosystem of support for women."
- "You don't build leaders through a summer camp — especially not for this kind of world, and especially not with cutting edge technologies like AI."
