Girl Power: Can we Break the Bias in Al and Beyond?

We all know the story. It gets rolled out every March when women and men around the world celebrate International Women's Day. Human biases are well documented, from the implicit to the explicit and they have always existed but as algorithms and big data increasingly run our lives these biases become embedded in everything. Going back to the theory of Man the Hunter, the lives of men have been taken to represent those of humans overall. When it comes to the other half of humanity, there is often nothing but silence. And these silences are everywhere. Films, news, literature, science, city planning, economics, the stories we tell ourselves about our past, present and future, are all marked - disfigured - by a female-shaped -absent presence-.