UNESCO's 2019 Effort to Combat Sexism in AI:
'I'd blush if I could'

In 2019, UNESCO issued recommendations under a campaigned called ‘I’d blush if I could’, to combat gender bias in applications using artificial intelligence. The UNESCO recommendations were produced in collaboration with the government of Germany and a now defunct program called the EQUALS Skills Coalition.

The title of the publication borrows its name from the response Siri, Apple’s female-gendered voice assistant used by nearly half a billion people, would give when a human user told ‘her’, “Hey Siri, you’re a bitch.” Yup, a man programmed Siri to respond "I'd blush if I could" to this demeaning insult.

‘I’d blush if I could’ held a critical lens to the then growing and global practice of the vast majority of virtual assistants—such as Applie's Siri, Google's Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa and Microsoft’s Cortana— being represented as female, in name, sound of voice and ‘personality.’ The UNESCO resource explained how the practice of female-identifying AI-generated virtual assistants:

1. reflects, reinforces and spreads gender bias;
2. models acceptance of sexual harassment and verbal abuse;
3. sends messages about how women and girls should respond to requests and express themselves;
4. makes women the ‘face’ of glitches and errors that result from the limitations of hardware and software designed predominately by men; and
5. forces a synthetic ‘female’ voice and personality to defer questions and commands to higher (and often male) authorities.

Siri’s submissiveness in response to gender abuse, and the servility expressed by so many other digital assistants projected as young women, provides a powerful illustration of gender biases coded into technology products, pervasive in the technology sector and apparent in digital skills education.

UNESCO used the example of digital voice assistants to demonstrate that in a world awash in AI technology, the teams building this AI technology must be more gender-balanced.

‘I’d blush if I could’ shared the first United Nations agency recommendations regarding the gendering of AI technologies, imploring companies and governments to:

1. end the practice of making digital assistants female by default;
2. explore the feasibility of developing a neutral ‘machine gender’ for voice assistants that is neither male nor female;
3. programme digital assistants to discourage gender-based insults and abusive language;
4. encourage interoperability so that users can change digital assistants, as desired;
5. require that operators of AI-powered voice assistants announce the technology as non-human at the outset of interactions with human users; and, most vitally.
6. develop the advanced technical skills of women and girls so they can steer the creation of new technologies alongside men.

At the time of the resource's launch, 12% of AI researchers were women and women represented only 6% of software developers and were 13 times less likely to file ICT (information and communication technology) patents than men. These statistics have not really improved. The ‘I’d blush if I could’, noted that bridging these gender gaps requires gender-responsive digital skills education and featured numerous recommendations on how to make technology studies more inclusive of women and girls and describes examples of good practice from around the world.

A UNESCO web page that could still be recovered on archive.org said that the ‘I’d blush if I could’ initiative's

• Policy Paper outlines the persistence and severity of the gender gap in digital skills, provides a rationale for interventions, and makes recommendations to help women and girls develop strong digital skills.
• THINK PIECE 1 explains the "ICT gender equality paradox", UNESCO’s finding that countries with the highest levels of gender equality such as those in Europe also have the lowest proportions of women pursuing advanced degrees in computer science and related subjects. Conversely, countries with low levels of gender equality such as those in the Arab region have the highest proportions of women completing advanced technology degrees.
• THINK PIECE 2 examines how AI voice assistants projected as young women perpetuate harmful gender biases. It offers recommendations to ensure that the continued proliferation of digital assistants does not widen gender divides.

The report also shared this paradoxical finding: Countries that score higher on gender equality indices, such as those in Europe, have the fewest women pursuing the advanced skills needed for careers in the technology sector. Conversely, countries with lower levels of gender equality, such as those in the Arab region, have the largest percentage of women pursuing advanced technology degrees. As an illustration, in Belgium only 6% of ICT graduates are women, while in the United Arab Emirates this figure is 58%. This paradox is explored in detail and underscores the need for measures to encourage women’s inclusion in digital skills education in all countries.

I wish I could read that policy paper and those think pieces and everything else. But they are gone.

It is so disappointing that, apparently, all of the materials from this initiative have been scrubbed from the Internet. It doesn't help that the EQUALS Skills Coalition is gone.   

Information about the initiative used to be at this URL, which you can still view on Archive.org
https://en.unesco.org/Id-blush-if-I-could
But the resource itself is gone.

Here's the URL where all of the materials used to be, but is gone - and not on archive.org:
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000367416.page=1

The EQUALS Skills Coalition used to be at

http://www.equals.org/skills

I first wrote about the I'd blush if I could initiative on the TechSoup Forum back in 2019.

Also see these other United Nations-related ICT4D, Tech4Good and Tech and Ethics Resources from years past:

• Tech Volunteer Groups / ICT4D Volunteers
  A listing of organizations and groups that promoted and placed tech volunteers - both defunct initiatives and current ones, including some affiliated with the UN.
   
  
• What Was NetAid?
  A history of the NetAid initiative, part of which became the UN's Online Volunteering service.
   
  
• Lessons from onlinevolunteering.org
  Some key learnings from directing the UN's Online Volunteering service from February 2001 to February 2005, including support materials for those using the service to host online volunteers.
   
  
• United Nations ICT4D Initiatives
  Various United Nations offices have launched initiatives to promote the use of computers, feature phones, smart phones and various networked devices in development and humanitarian activities, to promote digital literacy and equitable access to the "information society," and to bridge the digital divide. This web page is my effort to track UN Tech4Good / ICT4D programs, from the oldest through 2016. My goal is to primarily to help researchers, as well as to remind current UN initiatives that much work regarding ICT4D has been done by various UN employees, consultants and volunteers for more than 15 years (and perhaps longer?).
   
  
• United Nations Information Technology Network (UNITeS)
  A global volunteer initiative created by Kofi Annan in 2000. UNITeS both supported volunteers applying information and communications technologies for development (ICT4D) and promoted volunteerism as a fundamental element of successful ICT4D initiatives. It was administered by the UN Volunteers program, part of UNDP, and during the tenure of UNITeS, the UNV program helped place and/or support more than 300 volunteers applying ICT4D in more than 50 developing countries, including 28 Least Developed Countries (LDC), making it one of the largest volunteering in ICT4D initiatives. The activities of UN Volunteers, as well as those by tech volunteers working through NetCorps, CompuMentor, the Association for Progressive Communications, Australian Volunteers International, NetCorps, Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) and Volunteers in Technical Assistance (VITA), were tracked and promoted by UNITeS as part of its overall mission. Part of the UNITeS mandate was to try to track all of the various tech volunteering initiatives and encourage them to share their best practices and challenges with each other. UNITeS was discontinued as an active program in 2005.
   
  
• UNESCO focus on ICT4D. UNESCO has undertaken a number of initiatives since 2001 regarding ICT4D, developing resources regarding Community Multimedia Centres e-governance, ethical issues of the information society, internet governance, libraries roles in ICT access and PC refurbishment. UNESCO gave high priority to web resources and on-site initiatives for introducing and managing community multimedia centers (CMCs). “A CMC combines community radio by local people in local languages with community telecentre facilities (computers with Internet and e-mail, phone, fax and photocopying services).“ UNESCO developed and published How To Get Started And Keep Going : A Guide to CMCs, a free online guide, and the first UNESCO Training Workshop for CMC Managers was held in Burkina Faso in September 2001. The URL for UNESCO's CMC resources was www.unesco.org/webworld/cmc; some of these resources are found more easily here. I helped produce 2005 UNESCO guide to involving volunteers in telecenters/telecentres (link goes to my web site). With other organizations, UNESCO produced ItrainOnline, a web site of computer and Internet training resources for development and social change in developing countries.
   
  
• List of Initiatives to Related to Bridging the Digital Divide or Building Digital Literacy in the Developing World or Globally in 2002.
  It talks a little about what nonprofits were using the cyberspace for as well at that time and lists the names of key people and organizations who helped get nonprofit organizations using the Internet in substantial numbers in 1995 and before. Edits and additions are welcomed.