 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2019 in Budapest, Hungary, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio this morning by Carl Manton, who is a co-founder for Women Reclaiming AI. Carl, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Now, I'd like to start off by perhaps talking about the digital gender divide. What is it and why should we be concerned? I think, yeah, there is a digital gender divide, and I think that starts right from education. My other job is I'm a lecturer in creative computing, and our course is 90% male. And I think that's seen across UK universities, computing courses are generally more, there are more men on the courses or young men on the courses. So then right from then people going into jobs and into the jobs market, there's just much less women for recruiters to bring in. And then when you don't have women at the seat of the table designing systems that affect our everyday lives, there can be some design issues then that kind of favour men in a sense. So if you think about certain products like there are some fitness trackers that came to the market without tracking things like the menstrual cycle, which for women is really, really important. So that would be something that would be a big bonus by having a woman at the table or of course Google Maps. Google Maps famously directs people to walk through parks at night. And again if there was a woman in the design team, maybe these products wouldn't leave and go to market with these kind of design choices that don't always work for women. And how early is the digital divide starting then? I mean because it seems that boys and girls are given similar opportunities to learn these subjects at school, but perhaps they're not being encouraged further along the line, is that right? Yeah, I think it does start in school. I can only really speak about the UK, but I think there is a perception that computing is a boys' topic and I think that needs to change and it is changing. So even at university level when we look at who comes to our open days, we struggle to get women to come and just recruit. So, yeah, it does start at school then, fortunately, but I think there's so much work happening to change that. Yes, I mean, ITU itself is involved in girls in ICT day. It tries to encourage girls to look at technology options in technology and say obviously it tries to encourage them and mentor them along further down the line as well. But I wanted to ask you a little bit about the session that you were in yesterday about AI and gender bias. I wanted to ask you, how does it manifest itself in AI in particular? So the area that I'm particularly interested in through women becoming AI, which has started my co-founder, Vegeta Arga. So we should say obviously AI, artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence, yes, is conversational AI. So it's quite well documented that, well, on the whole, voice assistants default to a female voice. They were designed with female voices and female personalities and there is a pervasive depiction of AIs in assistant roles as women. And this reinforces traditional gender roles that women have been fighting hard against. And as it's said that between, I've heard different statistics, but around 11% to 22% of people working machine learning are women. So there's far greater number of men. So when men are then designing these voices and deciding how women should sound, they're making what's described as a 1950s secretary, they're making almost a fantasy that doesn't work for the female population. And we feel that by having women at the seat of the table, women in there making these design choices, we'd be able to critique more how the voice assistants sound. The voice assistants get a lot of abuse from users and there's been a lot of problems with when a voice assistant gets abusive language. It kind of is very docile, it capitulates, and speaks in a way that doesn't help other women and young girls to feel really, really positive about themselves. And the other side of that is that voice assistants are less likely to recognise your voice if you're a woman because they're largely tested on men. So, and then if you think about that and other diversity issues in terms of ethnicity, various accents people have from their social economic background, there's a lot of barriers to participation when our voice assistants are trained on one specific voice. So there's a lot of work happening now, but a lot more work needs to happen so that everyone has equal access to a voice interface that's going to affect the rest of our lives. It's amazing, because actually I noticed the other day my voice assistant who perhaps would be a male voice actually, and I think he lost patience with me because I said something anyway, yes! It was quite interesting how it had been programmed, perhaps it hadn't been programmed that way, but certainly it did seem to be a little bit irritated with me, but I wonder if a female voice assistant would be as irritated or perhaps more patient. I don't know, but that's fascinating stuff. You've talked a little bit about reclaiming AI. I just wanted to ask you what drove you to do this, apart from of course the very great need which obviously you're mentioning. Yes, so both myself and Brigitte work in male spaces who work in technology. When we noticed the voice assistants and the language that they were using and the way that they were being spoken to, we were sort of thinking about how this then affects women within a workplace when you have a voice assistant or in your home and you hear this woman's voice and you hear the way people speak to it as a woman that's quite difficult. So, yes, we decided to start our project Women Reclaiming AI. We started it with no funding. We just went off and started running workshops, bringing women together to talk about what AI is, demystify AI a little bit and then to teach them some basic skills and how they can create their own voice assistant. And then that gives them access to ours. So we have around 100 women now writing and editing our voice assistant. We've got a shared platform by which they can do that. And through writing the voice assistant, we're actually really starting to think about what is a feminist, what is this powerful woman and we're kind of developing a collective intelligence on what it is to be a woman which is really interesting. And we're kind of developing this really interesting feminist data set of lots of our own language but also quotes from women we admire. And so this voice assistant, will people be able to use it on their phones, on their tablets? So it's very much a protest. So it's not functional in the sense that it will tell you the time. A lot of what's in there currently is inspirational speech. So a lot of people, you might ask what is feminism, how do I stay strong in certain situations, why don't women work in technology and lots of things like that. But at the same time, one thing that came out of our workshops was that women felt they would like a female voice in their home that wasn't constantly available. So sometimes you might ask it something and it just says no, I'm busy and just turns off. So there's a lot of humour in it, it's really fun. That sounds very exciting. And how can people join these workshops and get involved? So our website is womenreclaimingai.com. You can contact us through that. We do put up where we're doing our next workshop at the moment they're mainly in the UK. But next month we're starting a training programme. So we're going to invite other women from the collective and also other interested women to come and train. And then they can bring women reclaiming AI to their own communities. We hope to use it more especially with younger women in schools. And so we can expand the project because as much as it is about upskilling and also activism it's also about community building and building a really engaged community of women who can advocate for what we want in technology. That sounds brilliant. Thank you so much for joining us in the studio. I wanted to finally ask you just the last question. What's the value for you of attending events such as Telecom World? I know that obviously you participated in a session yesterday but have you found it interesting? Have you found it of value to be here? Yes. This is my first time at Telecom World and I was invited to do the panel. But it's been invaluable the context that you meet. Really interesting networks of people, very global networks. Also to come and find out about some topics that I'm interested in but don't know a lot about. I was in a session about autonomous vehicles that I found fascinating. And then also to be able to share our project has been really important to us and we've been able to share it amongst people who are leaders in that area. Coral Manson, we've been reclaiming AI. Thank you very much for joining us and hopefully we'll catch up with you again in the sub-stage in the future. Thank you. Thank you. Cheers.