Men are so dominant in the development of artificial intelligence that there is a danger of a world controlled by “misogynistic robots”, one of Britain’s most senior female scientists has said.
Wendy Hall, regius professor of computer science at Southampton University, and a fellow of the Royal Society, told The Observer it was “more important than ever” that girls studied computing to ensure that the rapid technological advances transforming society reflected the needs of women as well as men.
“Women use computers all the time but we’re not part of the design or the build or the rollout,” she said. “We need the AI we’re developing to be unbiased. Of course, unbiased doesn’t just mean not being misogynistic. It means understanding what women want, understanding the female culture as well as the male culture. … AI is too important to be left to men.”
According to research by the Royal Society, the number of girls taking computing has more than halved over the last decade. Only about 20% of those taking computer science GCSE are girls, and just 28% of girls aspire to work in the technology industry compared with 60% of boys.
At university, 25% of computing students are female. The Royal Society calculates that at the current rate of uptake it would take 30 years to reach gender parity. Only 22% of data and AI professionals in the UK are women.
The risks of the gender imbalance will be discussed this week at a Royal Society conference on women and the future of science.
Describing herself as a “voice in the wilderness” as a female computer scientist, Hall said women were “invisible” in the technology industry. “It’s all tech bros. It’s very aggressive. Silicon Valley is very difficult for women to work in, but we need women there,” she said.
She said there was already an inbuilt gender bias in the data being used to train AI because the material reflected social values across the internet. “If you haven’t got diverse teams developing these things, it’s less likely you’re going to be developing ethical, fair, unbiased software.”
Hall said she wrote her first paper about the lack of female computer scientists in 1987. “Computers were sold as toys for the boys. They were put into schools without anyone knowing what to do with them except the boys and they didn’t train the teachers. It was all well-intentioned stuff, but the unintended consequence was we turned 50% of the population off computing in the 1980s and we’ve never really recovered from that.”
Girls still feel “peer pressure not to be the science geek” at school, she said. “So much has got to change. It’s society.
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“Everything we read, the way we live our lives is steered towards the idea that women don’t do science and engineering. Every time you look at anything to do with computing, it’s always the geeks, it’s always the male CEOs.”
Hall said she had even worked with scriptwriters for soap operas to try to get them to promote the idea of girls taking science. “In EastEnders, Ian Beale’s daughter famously wanted to do chemistry at university, and then they changed the storyline and she got murdered by her brother so that was the end of that.”
Around the world, women make up just one in three scientific researchers, according to a 2024 Unesco report.
Emily Darlington, the Labour MP for Milton Keynes Central, said the safety of women online was a “blind spot” for the “tech bros” driving the AI revolution.
“Grok [Elon Musk’s AI tool] would never have nudified women if there had been women in the room when it was developed,” she said.
“AI has huge potential for the UK economy but it’s a problem that this is a world that’s being shaped by men where the progress that we have made in the real world over a century is being rolled back online.”