M+E Connections

During a “Closing: Conference Takeaways” session that was part of the virtual SoCal Women’s Leadership Summit on Nov. 10, Women in Technology Hollywood (WiTH) executives highlighted some of the main themes about diversity, data challenges, artificial intelligence (AI) and algorithmic bias, and other themes from the event.

Noting this was her first Summit, iAsia Brown, co-chair of the WiTH Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Accessibility and Belonging (DEIAB) Committee and a data and AI specialist, said she snuck into “everybody’s sessions actually” to hear what else was being said outside of her session track, she said, adding: “I’ve got four screens so I can multitask.”

She spoke on the “Language of Diversity” during breakout session track 2, on Diversity, Inclusion and Accessibility. The conversations were interesting, she said. Alexia Clayborne, director of inclusion and accessibility (events, studios and marketing community) at Microsoft, was one of the other speakers and talked about what Microsoft was doing with technology to help create a more inclusive and accessible society.

It was good to hear other peoples’ experiences, Brown said, adding there is a need to “continue to create space for the people who cannot” do the kinds of things that most of us take for granted.

“Respect is the universal language of everyone,” Brown said. “It doesn’t matter where you are in the world. Even if you make a mistake” when using language around somebody from a different race, sex, etc., “as long as you respectfully acknowledge it and move forward, you’ll be OK,” she added.

She also pointed to a suggestion made at the Summit that you have to show up to do the work to make things happen.

Tobias Baer, senior advisor for the firms Talent Basket and Tymit, as well as a coach and scholar (psychology, risk management and data science), started off the main stage sessions, after opening remarks and the opening keynote, with a discussion on AI and algorithmic bias, Nina Skorus-Neely, secretary of the WiTH Foundation, noted.

Baer stressed it’s important for organizations to “be really deliberate in thinking about the fact that the data you have from the past will only re-predict more instances of the past and that you really need to think about expanding your dataset and data sources,” Skorus-Neely recalled. “You really need to think about your projects from an algorithmic perspective and make certain that you’re expanding the datasets you’re using and maybe figuring out creative ways of inventing or donating the data to make certain what you’re predicting is the future you want to have instead of another version of the past,” she added.

That was expanded on in the breakout sessions of track 1, Skorus-Neely said. For example, she pointed out that one speaker during the “Social Responsibility In Action: Feminist.AI Projects to Address Bias” session noted Feminist.AI is working on a project in which they’re looking at video footage archives and dealing with facial recognition and “planning on providing a capability that would allow people to donate their own video and then search through the archives, effectively for people like me.” The company is “in their early research stages of this but what I found really interesting about that is the implications for personalization… [and] equity from a visualization standpoint,” she added.

“There’s some really, really interesting research in that area as well as considerations for business and really thinking again about expanding your datasets to avoid bias and reimagine a different future,” Skorus-Neely said.

During the opening keynote “State of the Union – Women in the Workplace,” the data numbers given provided “a bit of a shock, a little bit of encouragement and a little bit of ‘oh, we’ve got some work to do; let’s roll up our sleeves,’” Skorus-Neely added.

Skorus-Neely said she loved the closing comments of Jeanne-Marie Ryan, head of people and culture at Fair Trade USA, about what she felt you can do now “to start moving the needle” and how she used “social capital to lift others as you climb” up the ladder of success. Ryan also provided a useful suggestion to use “gender decoders” to understand what language in job descriptions and elsewhere that your organization is using may be excluding others without you even realizing it, Skorus-Neely added.

It was, meanwhile, “super-interesting to hear each group’s experiences and what was shared,” according to Christina Aguilera, president of the WiTH Foundation.

She spent the last hour focused on “Wellness for Your Career” in track 4 and “I was thrilled to be assigned” that topic, she said. “But I was also worried about what I was missing out” on from the other breakout tracks, she said, noting she was glad to hear from the other panelists what was discussed in the other tracks.

One takeaway from the Summit that Nadya Ichinomiya, chairwoman of the WiTH Foundation Board, pointed to was that “we all take our tech for granted for the most part” with our multiple devices. After all, in some places, including in our cities and other countries, everybody doesn’t have access to such devices, she noted. Skorus-Neely chimed in that many people don’t have high-speed Internet either.

Ichinomiya reflected on a man she spoke to a few years ago who said he completed his college applications on a mobile flip phone because he and his mom were homeless.

“We need to raise all the boats,” according to Ichinomiya, who led track 3, on Customer Experience.

One way to do that is to send more devices that companies are not using to students and other people who need them, she said.

During the track 3 session “A Data-Driven Approach to Assessing Diversity in Content,” presented by Halleh Kianfar, director of product management at Nielsen’s Gracenote division, it was made clear there is an “upside” for companies to supply content for people in Latinx or other communities who are not getting the content they are looking for elsewhere, Ichinomiya added.