Grit’s approach has drawn international attention.
In October, Leonora and her team presented their app at the Feminist Foreign Policy Conference hosted by the French government in Paris, where global leaders met to discuss how technology and policy can be used to build a more gender-equal world. At the conference, 31 countries signed a pledge to make tackling gender-based violence a key policy priority.
Conversations are buzzing around the use of AI, says Lyric Thompson, the founder and head of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, “but the moment you try to include gender in the conversation, to raise the dangers of racist, sexist and xenophobic bias being baked in, eyes glaze over and the conversation shifts – likely to a back corridor where there aren’t any pesky women around to raise it”.
Heather Hurlburt – an associate fellow at Chatham House, specialising in AI and its use in tech – agrees that AI “has enormous potential either to help identify and redress gender discrimination and gender-based violence, or to entrench misogyny and inequity”, but adds which way we go is “very much up to us”.
Leonora is clear that the success of AI to tackle gender-based violence depends not just on engineering, but on who gets to design technology in the first place.
A 2018 World Economic Forum report found that only 22% of AI professionals globally were women, a statistic that is still often cited.
“AI as we know it now has been built with historic data that centres the voices of men, and white men in particular,” Leonora says.
“The answer is not only about having more women creators. We also need creators who are women of colour, more from the global south, and more from less privileged socio-economic backgrounds.”
Only then, Leonora Tima concludes, can technology begin to represent the realities of those who use it.