Welcome back to The Future in 5 Questions. Today we’re speaking with Brenda Darden Wilkerson, who’s served for more than five years as president and CEO of a nonprofit called AnitaB.org that aims to foster more opportunity for women and nonbinary technologists. Prior to joining AnitaB.org, her ideas made waves as the director of computer science and IT education for Chicago Public Schools, where she created a “Computer Science for All” initiative that helped inspire the tech policy vision of the Obama White House. Read on to hear her reservations about rushing into a new era of artificial intelligence and how rhetorical fights around words like “woke” are complicating efforts to diversify tech workplaces. Responses have been edited for length and clarity. What’s one underrated big idea? Based upon what we do, the biggest underrated idea is that we'd hire more women if we could just find them, if they would just get trained. That's what we're waiting on, in order to diversify tech. First of all, we are talking with some of the most educated blocs of people out there, and it lends itself to the trend over the last 20 years of degree inflation. When I was a technologist, I was one of the only people with a technology degree. The men had a bent — many of them were either not educated at all or they had other degrees. And there was this concept that they could learn it. Now we have this, “No, you have to have a master's degree or a PhD to come in at the entry-level,” which is just another barrier. We know that the minimum amount of bump in the bottom line to companies is about 19 percent when their workforce is diverse throughout, all the way up through leadership. One of the things that we do with our policy and engagement is to bring about those awarenesses and dispel those fallacies. Companies are leaving a lot of money on the table waiting for these women to get trained, that already are — the fear is about the shift in power. And the shift needs to occur. What’s a technology you think is overhyped? The way we're addressing AI is incorrect. I don't know if I would define it as overhyped but it is disproportionately approached as an innovation we can't stop or we can't actually slow. It's important for us to back up and take a look at the impact that it has on people. We’ve seen the obvious harms of facial recognition, we've seen the obvious harms of using it in the policing system, using it in cases where judges decide who's going to get what sentence based upon old biases. So instead of thinking, “Oh, isn't this great, ChatGPT could write my speech,” we need to think about what is the greater impact on humanity of AI. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I want to start back where I found my passion to create “Computer Science for All.” That book was called “Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing.” It's a book by Jane Margolis and Joanna Goode, two of my she-roes. They compared the issue with racial segregation around swimming pools to racial segregation around tech education, which at the time was really focused on computation, so computer science. And they noted the history — which right now people are trying to erase — of the pools being segregated, that Black people were not allowed in the pools. And so what we find many times is Black people and brown people, women not allowed in technical education, which stops the pathway, the pipeline in. I really got inspired to fix that. And out of that, I was able to start “Computer Science for All.” I could mention one more, called “Invisible Women.” It’s about really the lack of centering of women in most datasets and written by Caroline Criado Perez. It's like 10 chapters that just hit you right in the middle of your eyes — how women are just not in the data and the impact it has on systems, whether it's the medical system or car crash testing. What could government be doing regarding tech that it isn’t? The government could set the example for what it looks like to have a diverse workforce. They could bring in more women, more minoritized people, people of color, into tech and create applications that speak to everybody because that's its job. If you think back to the Obama administration, with the Affordable Care Act and creating Healthcare.gov — it wasn’t perfect at first, but we still use it today. And it was a way to usher in people's access to things that the government had decided they will have access to. But it's one of many government websites. That's the barrier, right? The team brought in a very diverse set of technologists, many of them women, many of them people of color, many of them of various age ranges, to address the issues that they were uniquely qualified to understand. So more people therefore were served. What has surprised you most this year? The rhetoric and the impact of the rhetoric. The co-opting of terms, the co-opting of “woke” — people are not willing to push back against the ridiculous. But people are consumed by it. The impact of it on companies has been that the DEI efforts have been sort of squashed. I've talked to some colleagues that do diversity work who say that the calls are coming in less and less, to come in and talk about diversity. Or when you come in, “don't use that word ‘equity’” — which is ridiculous. Or “don't use that word ‘equality.’” We should all be frightened by that. A lot of our work is education. There’s no boogeyman in any of this.
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