this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2023
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Not defending musk, but it is really difficult to find women in AI. The few that are around are very valuable for tech companies that will pay higher salaries to have "token women", better if they are from some minority group, to show better diversity statistics. Therefore retention is also difficult. Finding good people in AI is already difficult and expansive, finding women is a real challenge.
I strongly believe that diversity brings a lot of value, and women are important in any team. But the solution unfortunately is not in the current market, but it is at school levels. Culture must change.
Eh, the gender imbalance is bad, but not 0/12 bad... here are some stats
Nice stats, but it isn't broken down on industry. From experience (I worked in different fields) in some industries such as pharma, people analytics or marketing, women are even likely the majority (they were majority when I worked in pharma, for instance). In more "pure" tech and fintech companies, I do not believe those stats represent the "natural distribution". I know it's anecdotal, but trust me, it's not easy to find woman in AI in some industries. They are highly valued, well paid and have quick career progression because of this, to attract and retain them.
That said, elon is probably "machist" type of guy, I am not defending him. Just trying to give a bit of context
The entire paper is already sub-field (AI) in industry (software engineering) specific. No stats are perfect, but I think these ones are pretty damn good for something where peoples role are pretty poorly determined in the first place. Of course you're welcome to try and find better ones.
The "pure tech" companies I've worked at have been roughly equivalent or better than these stats, but at that point I'm sampling from software engineers in general (not having worked at an AI specific company), and my sample is unlikely to be unbiased anyways.
AI is in all industries, from pharma, insurance, finance. Nowadays it is not even a sub field of software engineering, more of a subfield of data science. If you check the background of those who work in AI, you find the most varied combinations, from maths, to engineering, stats, and physics.
I don't have better statistics unfortunately. And I don't even want to be right.
My anecdotal experience is that women cluster in some industries, in other industries they are difficult to find, in AI more than in other subfields of data science such as what is historically defined as "statistical inference".
Again this is anecdotal, not hard science. But, as we don't have stats, better than nothing.
Edit. Again, not trying to defend anyone, just adding information for people to draw their own conclusions.
Mine are that elon was trying to save some money, and he doesn't value diversity to invest on it, and put the extra effort to create it