Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Here's how AI is shining a light on female scientists

A laboratory worker tests vegetable sample at the Supervision and Testing Center for Vegetable Quality of Ministry of Agriculture in Beijing August 2, 2007. China defended the "made-in-China" label on the eve of Asia's largest security forum on Wednesday and the United States said it attached great importance to the region despite the absence of its top foreign policy official. REUTERS/Alfred Cheng Jin (CHINA) - GM1DVVLCQXAA

Eighty-two percent of the biographies on Wikipedia are about men. Image: REUTERS/Alfred Cheng Jin (CHINA) - GM1DVVLCQXAA

Kristin Houser
Writer, Futurism

FEMINIST AI. Yes, artificial intelligence (AI) can perpetuate bias. But it turns out it can also help us overcome it.

On Friday, John Bohannon, director of science for AI startup Primer, published a blog post about Quicksilver, an AI tool that is helping improve the way Wikipedia covers overlooked scientists, many of whom are women.

TRAINING THE TECH. The Primer team started by feeding Quicksilver a whole lot of information — specifically, 30,000 scientists with Wikipedia entries. This information included the Wikipedia articles themselves, the scientists’ Wikidata entries, and a total of more than 3 million sentences from news coverage describing the scientists and their work.

Next, the team fed Quicksilver the names and affiliations of 200,000 people who’d written scientific papers. Within a day, the system determined that 40,000 of those authors didn’t have Wikipedia entries, even though they had been covered in the news just as much as scientists with entries. It also found valuable information that was missing from the entries that already exist.

Identifying overlooked scientists wasn’t all Quicksilver could do. It could also automatically draft Wikipedia-style entries on those scientists using all the reference information at its fingertips (so to speak). The company published 100 of these entries online in the hopes a human would pick up where Quicksilver left off by actually adding the entries to Wikipedia.

Have you read?

EQUAL REPRESENTATION. Eighty-two percent of the biographies on Wikipedia are about men, but Quicksilver could change that.

“Wikipedia is incredibly biased and the underrepresentation of women in science is particularly bad,” Jessica Wade, a physicist who has personally written Wikipedia entries for nearly 300 women scientists over the past year, told WIRED. “With Quicksilver, you don’t have to trawl around to find missing names, and you get a huge amount of well-sourced information very quickly.”

The Primer team has already lent Quicksilver to three English Wikipedia edit-a-thons specifically focused on improving the site’s coverage of women scientists. Between the AI’s efforts and those of Wade (and people like her), we’re closer than ever to closing Wikipedia’s science biography gender gap. And maybe that will push us towards closing the gender gap in science altogether.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

Sign up for free

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Stay up to date:

Gender Inequality

Related topics:
Equity, Diversity and InclusionEmerging TechnologiesEducation and Skills
Share:
The Big Picture
Explore and monitor how Gender Inequality is affecting economies, industries and global issues
A hand holding a looking glass by a lake
Crowdsource Innovation
Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale
World Economic Forum logo
Global Agenda

The Agenda Weekly

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

Subscribe today

You can unsubscribe at any time using the link in our emails. For more details, review our privacy policy.

What is menopause – and how does it impact women’s health and work life?

Charlotte Edmond

October 23, 2024

From herding to coding: the Mongolian NGO bridging the digital divide

About us

Engage with us

  • Sign in
  • Partner with us
  • Become a member
  • Sign up for our press releases
  • Subscribe to our newsletters
  • Contact us

Quick links

Language editions

Privacy Policy & Terms of Service

Sitemap

© 2024 World Economic Forum