by Lionesses of Africa Operations Department
2,500 years ago-ish a chap called Plato (sound of a thousand University Professors spluttering into their morning coffee at the casual description of one of the world’s greatest philosophers, and as it happens, the ‘inventor’ of the University), wrote a set of books called The Republic, in which he took on the form of his teacher, the great Socrates (considered to be the founder of ‘Western’ Philosophy) to answer moral, ethical and philosophical questions. There are for us two major themes that run through these books, the first being the power of storytelling, or to be more exact, the importance of storytelling in building power.
What Plato knew well was the way in which all people are influenced by stories and if the stories are ingrained at birth, takes a fierce will not to be controlled later by these. Such stories were too important to be left to luck. The second theme we picked up was the equality of all. Plato states that it is ridiculous to look upon men as the rulers and women as not: “…citizens will share the same upbringing and education, as well as the same jobs. There is no reason, Socrates thinks, why being female is by itself a disqualifier.” (here)
“What is distinctive of a guardian-ruler is the kind of soul they have, a soul capable of wisdom, of knowledge of what is best for the city as a whole.” Not a physical difference, but a psychological one.
So here we are, 2,500 years later and there is no equality of sexes across the globe, indeed the The World Bank state (here) “Only 14 countries…[show] an equal legal standing with men across…mobility, workplace, pay, marriage, parenthood, entrepreneurship, assets, and pensions…”
Where did we go wrong? - Plato will tell us, we didn’t stand a chance, it’s in the stories.
Stories that have insisted for years that men fight, hunt and gather, while women create the home. Proving this point recently was years of refusal to even check if a body of a Viking warrior was male or female (obviously male, all the academics told us, a waste of time to check). Finally a check was made and surprise surprise, this warrior turned out to be female!
As the authors of the report (here) state: “…the biological sex of the individual was taken for granted…[and following the clear proof]…questions were still raised…Similar associations of women buried with weapons have been dismissed, arguing that the armaments could have been heirlooms…”. The authors noting that: “Male individuals in burials with a similar material record are not questioned in the same way.” Childhood stories have such power. Just because your father read you bedtime stories about male warriors, and James Bond, they can’t be female, that is how the world is? Laughable. And it was laughable to Plato too.
The worry for us is that these lies (you will forgive us if we don't hide behind Plato’s term ‘stories’) are about to grow even larger with AI.
“Experts estimate that as much as 90% of online content may be synthetically generated by 2026.” Here from Europol. That’s a huge amount of fake Pope Francis wearing a cool white puffa-coat type-of-photos we have to contend with (see here).
At issue is the starting point at which AI creates images, and indeed will increasingly ‘guide’ and dictate our decision making in the future. If you played a game where you could only move forward 2% of the total you threw with your dice and your opponent could take 98% of their total, you will quickly realise that after a few throws your opponent was not only way ahead of you but each further throw is widening the gap further.
This is happening in finance where a mere 2% of finance in Africa goes to women founded and led businesses (add a single male and that increases only to 15% in total), so diverse, single and all male teams take the balance of 98% (see here). That is why when the WEF say it will take 132 years to close the Gender Gap (here), or 286 years “if the current rate of progress continues”, according to the UN Women and UN DESA (here), we believe they have misunderstood the power of multiples - why the casino owner always makes money over time. We, as Lionesses are starting with dice throws that are worth so much less and the gap is increasing, in law, in finance, all forms of access…
AI meanwhile magnifies this effect. Two Bloomberg researchers (here) found on generating over 5,000 images of ‘typical’ holders of jobs, that high paying jobs (such as “politician,” “lawyer," “judge” and “CEO.”) had a lighter skin tone, whereas lower paying jobs, a darker one. AND. “Most occupations in the dataset were dominated by men, except for low-paying jobs like housekeeper and cashier.”
“In the US, women are underrepresented in high-paying occupations, [although] gender representation across most industries has improved significantly over time. Stable Diffusion depicts a different scenario, where hardly any women have lucrative jobs or occupy positions of power.” For example, Judges were shown to be 3% women in the US with AI, whereas the true figure is closer to 34%.
It gets worse. “Because it simultaneously amplifies both gender and racial stereotypes, Stable Diffusion tends to produce its most skewed representations of reality when it comes to women with darker skin.”
MIT’s Dr Joy Buolamwini, the founder of the Algorithmic Justice League and an award-winning researcher (please watch her video here), confirms that AI has a real problem with recognising darker females - even finding (here) that photos of Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey were both labeled as male! Joy points out that these have real world impacts in who gets what job offers, home loans and many other areas, (we would add business loans and other finance), risking as she says, “…gains made in civil rights and gender equity, under the guise of machine neutrality.”
AI takes the inbuilt bias and then, just like our players in our game, allows the 98% and 2% to play on and on, thereby increasing the number of male and pale highly paid, whilst decreasing them in say nursing or even terrorism to the point where life altering decisions will be made with completely skewed data.
So yes, how did we get to this point? In a way it is not the machine’s fault that it has taken the biases in everyday life, and thanks to our dice, just magnified them. These biases were started way back in the stories told from childhood.
“You know, don’t you, that the beginning of any process is most important, especially for anything young and tender? It’s at that time that it is most malleable and takes on any pattern one wishes to impress upon it.” Plato could have been writing about the young AI.
That is why there has to be regulation - not the FIFA regulation where women are told to pick their battles and work hard to persuade men of the merits of change (please see here, it’s worth it), but real regulation where the world we want to live in is depicted by AI, now, so that when we roll the dice, we have equal chances.
Strange to say, but AI has given us a chance to leapfrog far into the future. If stories are so powerful, then we have a chance now to change the narrative, to bring it back to Plato’s words: “What is distinctive of a guardian-ruler is the kind of soul they have, a soul capable of wisdom, of knowledge of what is best for the city as a whole.” What is best for any City? Certainly not 2% vs 98%.
For those who say we cannot play with the numbers, they are what they are, AI is already playing with the numbers. Judges were shown to be 3% women in the US with AI, whereas the true figure is closer to 34%. Take it the other way and 65% is just as false.
In turn, we also have to take control of our narrative. Encourage female friends who have also founded companies to join communities such as the Lionesses of Africa, as these are essential in telling our stories at the scale that will be noticed. Such communities matter as Sewela Setshogoe the Founder and CEO of Lefata Engineering, said at a recent Lioness Business Agility webinar, because: “Individually our voices are just not loud enough.”
Write your start up stories, your helpful hints, celebrate your wins, your building of jobs and communities, write on all and send them into Melanie who will publish them widening your influence. Celebrate the success of other Lionesses through their stories. When our Data Division reach out as they often do with surveys and questionnaires, please continue to support our drive to have your collective story told, openly and truthfully.
We really are stronger together.
Stay safe.