Rebekah Bastian at the Be Bold Now Event on March 4 in Seattle. | Cecile Miller Photography
This story is from a speech at the annual Be Bold Now event, where women discussed leadership and power. Formidable was the media sponsor and we’ll highlight a new speaker each Friday. Listen to the full speech on the Formidable podcast.
Rebekah Bastian has worked with AI for years, but now, in her role as chief marketing officer for Bellevue-based AI safety company mpathic, she’s “really in the weeds with what’s being built here.”
Bastian, a Seattle resident, is an entrepreneur and the author of Blaze Your Own Trail, described as a “modern, feminist take” that encourages women to create their own adventures and outcomes.
“I have this philosophy that there’s not a single one right path through life,” she says. “What are you passionate about? What are you good at? Oftentimes, I think where you're needed might be just recognizing that there's a problem to solve and that you could be the person to solve it.”
For her, that was AI and mpathic, a startup working to make AI systems safer in sensitive situations such as mental health and health care.
Here’s her perspective on the importance of women getting involved in AI, in her own words (edited for length and clarity).
Many of you probably wouldn’t think of AI as one of your passions. Let me pose a few other passions that might resonate with you, like mitigating biases.
One study found when you ask models to create a picture of a doctor, 82% of the time it shows a man, whereas in the UK, where the study was conducted, doctors are only 47% men. This is propagating biases.
This really matters. There was a Stanford study that showed when people see imagery of people in careers online, it affects what gender they picture for that particular career. That has implications. Another looked at AI resume parsers and found that these AI tools preferred names associated with men in 55% of the cases and with women in 11%. Bias like that has an impact on who gets hired and who gets paid. AI in health care tends to yield worse results for women.
Obviously, there’s already an existing gender pay gap, but there’s a huge risk of that widening even more as it relates to AI.
Women are underrepresented in the AI workforce, and AI jobs are going to be lucrative. AI job displacement is disproportionately affecting women. Thirty percent more women than men are losing their jobs due to AI automations. Who is working on (AI) is going to determine what direction we go.
Are you good at raising children? That’s what’s needed in building AI, training and prompting AI models. There are a lot of similarities there, things like teaching somebody how to learn or to understand right from wrong.
It doesn't mean that you have to have deep AI skills. There’re so many different transferable skills that we can all be bringing. You definitely are needed.
With AI being so prevalent, it doesn’t mean you have to have deep AI skills to work in AI or impact the future. There are so many different transferable skills we can all be bringing. History is literally being made right now, and it needs a much more diverse range of people working on it. You definitely are needed.
