When Tech Meets Women's Rights

I can see that some of you are already paying your respects in the chat section I also pay my respects to those Elders of those traditional lands on which you are joining us from and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may be joining us tonight for this presentation. So welcome everyone um I know we have a really large number of Brennan students and Alumni and staff here tonight which is really fabulous to see. I imagine like me you're very excited to hear Ramona's incredibly interesting and topical talk. While I have the pleasure of being one of Ramona's colleagues it's actually rare for me to get a chance to hear her talk about her work at length and so this is a real pleasure for me this evening. Before I formally introduce Ramona I'm just going to remind you about a few Zoom housekeeping events and I know we're all quite familiar with it now although we still seem to manage to keep ourselves on mute sometimes when we don't want to. So please remember to mute your microphone if you are not speaking um if you feel comfortable and your bandwidth allows you to do so please feel free to put your camera on it can make it a little bit more interactive and it's nice to see some friendly faces um if you do have your camera on and it starts to freeze for you just turn your camera off and it will free up some bandwidth for you. We will have time for questions at the end which you can either ask in person um or you could put it in the chat and so if you want to put your question in the chat you can start to do that while Ramona is talking so you don't forget the question and we will read it out later on at the end. In terms of the five reflection on justice points for the Brennan students who are participating tonight you will automatically be awarded these if you have joined the session with the name that you have in CareerHub in the university systems. If you have joined the zoom event using another name like a nickname or perhaps you'd used someone else's computer please just put your name like your full name that's in CareerHub into the chat section and then Crystal and other members of the team can mark you off. So now it's my great pleasure to introduce you to our special guest for tonight um Associate Professor Ramona Vijeyarasa. So Ramona joined UTS in 2017 as a Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow having completed her PhD at UTS and a Master of Laws at New York University Law School she's an award-winning scholar and currently leads the JD program here at UTS. She's the chief investigator behind the Gender Legislative Index, aniInnovative tool to rank and score legislation against global standards for women's rights. If you haven't looked at the Gender Legislative Index please just Google it and it will be your first thing that comes up and it's incredibly exciting to have a look at. This work has been instrumental in the establishment of the Tasmanian Legislative Council's Gender Inequality Audit Committee. Ramona has advised the Australian government and lots of NGOs both in Australia and overseas on women's rights and gender related interventions. Before joining UTS Ramona held several positions on women's rights in international organizations non-profits and international NGOs. This work included advancing anti-trafficking victim reintegration networks in Vietnam and the Ukraine, filing briefs before the European Court of Human Rights the Supreme Court of Moldova and the Supreme Court of the Philippines, making submissions to the UN treaty bodies and overseeing research and programming on women and youth in urban spaces. This very incredibly rich and varied experience informs Ramona's impact-driven approach to research. She's widely published and I'm not going to pretend to go through all of those but last year she published the Woman President which explores the difference women leaders can make on women's lives through the law. She's also published extensively on trafficking modern slavery work and supply chains, gender responsive legislation and much more. She's also won multiple awards and again I'm not going to pretend to go through all of those but I'll just name a couple of recent ones um in 2023 she was the winner of the American Society of International Law Scholarship Prize in recognition of Excellence in International Law Scholarship involving women and girls, gender, and feminist approaches and in 2022 she won the Women in AI award for the Law Category. So please join me in welcoming Ramona who'll be speaking about when Tech Meets Women's Rights. 
Thank you thank you so much Jane for that really kind and actually very humbling introduction. It is an absolute pleasure to deliver this year's ifth Brennan Justice talk for 2023 and also the first for UTS Tech and Social Justice Week. Before I share my remarks however I would also like to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land where I stand the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation where I'm privileged to live and work every day. As you'll hear from my talk I actually spent quite a bit of time living overseas working as a women's rights lawyer. Before I knew it 11 years had passed when I moved back to Sydney I was very positively surprised to see how commonplace it had become to acknowledge the traditional owners whose lands we occupy. This was not something I saw before I left Sydney in 2006 and today I think it's not just normal practice but it's also a much more considered and thoughtful one, so I would add in paying my respects to Elders past present and emerging and any First Nations people joining us today, but I also take it as a reminder that change however slow is always possible. So it was around 12 years ago 13 years ago that I found myself living outside this very beautiful nation working in what was fairly new terrain for me. I was a women's rights lawyer hitting the women's rights team at Action Aid International living in Ghana. Action Aid International is an anti-poverty NGO with offices in more or less 45 countries including a Sydney office here in Australia and I was working for the Johannesburg headquarters out of their office in Accra and these are some of the photos I took during my time in Ghana. For an anti-poverty NGO that had largely been focused on rural poverty we had just turned our minds to the kind of urban poverty that women were experiencing every day living in big cities. Over the years that followed I was very privileged to meet with countless women who would tell me stories of their experiences of urban poverty. From garment workers in Cambodia living in the export processing zones through to young women and girls living in Johannesburg in South Africa where they had these daily experiences of water and electricity cuts forcing them to use public toilets and public showers and often negotiate access to them because they had been taken over by groups of men who would bribe those young girls through various means just so that they could use them. But it was in Brazil that I saw a level of Civil Society organization like no other in the slums or favelas in Rio in Sao Paulo in Eliopoulos I witnessed the outcomes of a neighborhood community taking back at city. So in a lot of these slum communities women and men really mobilize to activate governments to actually deliver change and in Eliopoulos in Sao Paulo the community really took back its public space and they were making demands for the government of Eliopoulos to address inadequate public housing really poor streets issues around health and education and on my visit to Eliopoulos in Sao Paulo I actually got to visit the community center that resulted from those years of advocacy and in that community center was a small community library and a bunch of computers but it was really the women of Eliopoulos that I think benefited the most from this advocacy child care was introduced as a public service and after one of their most successful night marches the government of Eliopoulos started to prioritize repairing street lights. These were smart and brave women and I think they were changing their daily experiences of safety and security so you might be wondering why I'm talking about this particular story as part of a talk for Tech and Social Justice week. Well it became really apparent very quickly to me that a new development was emerging in the way women's groups were claiming their rights and demands for change so you have to remember this was back in 2010, 2011, and a lot has happened in terms of technology since then remember the iPhone was only released in 2007. So some of you might have heard of these save cities apps that flourished in the months or years that followed back then 13 years ago and at Action Aid I headed up a multi-country program on safe cities and we piloted this program in Bangladesh in Cambodia in India in South Africa and Brazil and at the same time the United Nations through UN women were running a similar program. Women from all around the world in Delhi in Istanbul in London and even here in Sydney and in Melbourne started to campaign using mobile phone apps and they would mark unsafe streets with crosses or unlit bus shelters or places where public transport stopped at a particular time of the day which would obviously affect certain women who needed it the most particularly women who were shift workers. In a really extraordinary way technology was offering women a new solution it was sort of like a virtual protest. However, the whole response also raised a bigger issue who would be responsible if the markings on the maps actually alerted abusers to the least lit streets and therefore the riskiest places where women moved. Very quickly we realize these women were marking these unsafe places on apps that were public and potential abusers who were mostly men who might have wanted to target women suddenly knew where to go. So this was my first real foray into women's rights and technology I've always wanted to be a women's rights lawyer and I had instilled in me from a very young age by my parents who were migrants to Australia in the 1970s this need to be conscious of those around us with less and so for me law which I think has incredible potential to advance social justice has always been my natural terrain. Technology if you know me you would know is certainly not so this shift into technology and law has certainly been less planned for me and I imagine I'm not the only feminist lawyer who has found herself at this unusual crossroads between technology and women and law after all this language of femtech which was really coined to talk about the way in which women's health has been advanced through technology only really emerged in 2016 and 17 years on I think women's groups are much more cognisant of the potential behind technology for women's health but also all the challenges and risks that it pose especially from a privacy perspective. So fast forward from those early years at Action Aid in to 2017 when after a decade living in I think what was pretty much every inhabitable continent in the world I returned to Sydney and I joined the University of Technology Sydney. I think this move back into academia made so much sense for me and I think I'm really so well supported by my cohort of socio legal scholars like Jane who do brilliant work and many feminist socio-legal researchers. So I just build on pathways that I think have been walked long before me also given that technology in UTS's name but our commitment to social justice I think this marriage between Tech and social justice in my work has a really natural home even if my journey hasn't always been an easy one and I'll talk about that Journey a little bit later. So as Jane mentioned earlier last year and to my great shock I won this award as a woman in AI in the law category but I think probably in reality my work is better described as a woman working with AI and using AI for bigger goals so my goal in my work is to help fight gender inequality through the law and I'm willing to try any means that might work new and old that I think legislators and policy makers can take on board to advance gender equality um and in that sense I really want to exploit the incredible potential I see when law and technology come together so I want to tell you a little bit about how I came to that point and as the creator of the gender legislative index and my starting point was really a social justice one but hopefully we'll arrive at the point where you can see the potential I see when technology and law come together but also what I think we're up against so I consider myself an Australian scholar of gender equality if pressed to give an elevator pitch my research studies how to bring a gender lens to legislation, what tools legislators need to make that a reality, what are some of the barriers and if those barriers can be overcome what are the benefits for women? If you were to catch a second lift with me I would tell you that I created the Gender Legislative Index to measure the gender responsiveness of domestic legislation when measured against women's rights standards. It uses human evaluators and machine learning to do that. 
So imagine now that the lift gets stuck and I'll explain to you why I think tools like the gender legislative index actually matter to a country like Australia so some of you might be familiar with the world economic forums Global Gender Gap Index. If you're not it's definitely worth spending some time having a look. So the World Economic Forum's

Global Gender Gap Index made attention-grabbing headlines when they declared that the world is 135 years away from gender parity on a global scale and that figure has more or less shifted from between 100 years and 200 years but to put it simply we are far away from where we need to be. 
So the Global Gender Gap Index is has been released by the World Economic Forum almost every year since 2006 and it ranks countries for their performance on gender equality overall and it has all these sub-ranks on women's economic participation, on women's educational attainment, something Australia actually does really well on, political participation and then health and well-being. So in comparative terms Australia fell from a rank of 15th back in 2006 just after Canada to a rank of 50th in 2021 and we had a slight Improvement to 43rd in 2022. I will say that in 2023 our rank improved considerably to 26 and that's between Mozambique and 25th and Chile in 27th and I think a big part of why our rank improved so much is that after the election at the federal level there's been a huge increase in the number of women in politics which is one of the measures of the index. So this rank both in the Global Gender Gap Index is a rank of relative inequality and what this means is that the inequality gap between Australian men and Australian women, because it measures in binaries, is bigger than the inequality rate than all the other countries that rank before us and I think it comes as no surprise that Australia ranks behind Norway and Finland and Sweden and Iceland and the kind of countries we assume um gender equal but Australia's rank also puts us behind Rwanda, the Philippines, New Zealand, Mozambique, and a whole host of other countries and I think what's particularly concerning is that according to the organization for economic cooperation and development Australia is one of the 10th richest countries in the world based on GDP per capita. So basically what that means is that we can do better and yet we perform particularly badly when compared to countries with the same levels of economic development as our own. So as someone who spent a long time obviously living overseas to me it's really important to acknowledge that gender equality is obviously not a third world problem it's not a global south problem it's a global problem. Although obviously we need to recognise that the way women experience inequality is very different in a country like Australia than it is elsewhere but I think it's so evident how important gender inequality is and how prevalent it is in a country like Australia after everything we've seen in these last few years everything from Me Too but also when we acknowledge which women in Australia are being left behind. If we think about the rapid rise in homelessness among older women in Australia or the inequality gaps experienced by First Nations women. So I've effectively created the gender legislative index as a tool to potentially do something about this and so I started my research on women's rights and I got to this point where I I thought I want to create a tool to measure whether law can play a more fundamental role. I think law hasn't reached its Optimum potential in this fight for gender equality and so I started evaluating legislations and I created scores and I had pieces of legislation and pieces of paper and I was mocking up things on Excel and I got to the stage where I thought I think this could work this tool to measure legislation and compare provisions in laws but my skills as a women's rights lawyer sort of ended there and I needed collaborators. I needed collaborators to take this into something that had scale and that could actually send a message to people in a way that might lead to change and so I looked for collaborators and I ended up collaborating with the UTS Connected Intelligence Center which is a team of data scientists who do all this amazing data analysis and data visualization work and they're actually based just on the other side of Broadway and with Rapido Social who sit in the Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology actually in our Building 2 and they do all sorts of incredible things they build bionic limbs but they also do a lot of software engineering and have helped our very own Anti-Slavery Australia but also have collaborated with me on the Gender Legislative Index and I owe many thanks to my collaborators for believing in my vision for a tool to demonstrate better where the law is playing its part in correcting inequality and making women's lives better. So the GLI or the Gender Legislative Index is an interface to measure how well domestic laws actually take into account the differences between men and women and the needs of specific groups of women especially those women who are being left behind and it's powered by a mix of human evaluators and machine learning and I'd like to take you through step by step how the gender legislative index works, what sort of evaluations have come out of it, and then what impact it's had and then I'm going to turn in the last part of my presentation to this bigger question of gender and AI. So effectively we have a team of evaluators and they evaluate the actual provisions of pieces of legislation and they do that by asking these seven questions on the screen here. So they ask the type of questions like does this law actually guarantee access to services? Does it guarantee access to information? Does it protect women from non-coerced decision making and promote equality? And those seven questions have been derived from a study that I did of the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women. When evaluators answer those seven questions they place their answer on a scale from gender regressive right through to gender responsive, but obviously whether a service is is available in a law or whether a law promotes equality is going to differ depending on whether the law is about reproductive health or whether the law is about tax or whether the law is about mining and so the gender legislative index has built in, thanks to a team of researchers who worked with me, a set of benchmarks so that the evaluators can make their evaluation based on good practice in a particular area of law. Once the evaluator placed the answer on a scale from aggressive to responsive they give an overall assessment of a law. Deciding whether it shows a complete disregard for international standards right through to meeting International standards and effectively the evaluation team has shown that laws in Australia in the place in the context of workplace health and safety don't actually count gender-based violence in the way they treat dangers or risks on the factory floor. So our Work Health and Safety Act tends to look at lack of safety in terms of accidents or spillages and workplace hazards and not the kind of harassment that women might be experiencing in those workplaces. Evaluators have shown that Australia's paid parental leave laws set women as the primary carer and promote this suggestion that women, as opposed to equal caring between parents, are responsible for children and that's really been the case until this year when Australia's paid parental leave scheme has changed, it's been reformed, and evaluators have pointed out that Australian tax laws that have a dependent spouse tax offset discriminate against non-married women and often encourage women in heterosexual relationships to work few hours or part-time, creating greater financial insecurity among women. But so often is the case as you can see the Gender Legislative Index has a lot of data in it and there's laws from Australia that have been evaluated but also Indonesia  the Philippines and Sri Lanka and I often had people say to me well which country scores the best which laws are the best people wanted a bigger headline story and so this is where my work with data scientists really began and so I started working with a data scientist and very quickly realised that lawyers and data scientists speak very different languages and it sounds a bit like a bad joke a lawyer and a data scientist met in a bar we didn't actually meet in a bar but I have to say I was very privileged to work with a data scientist who genuinely wanted to understand our science of the law and he would sit and ask me questions well what makes this law regressive for women how does that work in practice? Is gender neutral a good thing or a bad thing? Is it just a cover for a gender blind law? So we had many many conversations of that kind and we reached two solutions and the first solution was to use heat mapping and so heat mapping allowed us to show when there was agreement or disagreement among evaluators because lawyers often disagree on things and I didn't want to hide that data in the Gender Legislative Index so the heat mapping tool shows how much agreement there is among evaluators about a particular score and you can see that in the top on the right hand side this is what the GLI looked like as a first mock-up it was pretty simple it was all coated in blue, but you could see levels of agreement or disagreement among evaluators. And in the bottom half of the screen on the right this is how the Gender Legislative Index looks now, because we use user experience expertise to change some of the coloring in the scheme and make it just look a bit more accessible to a public audience. But I think what really sets the Gender Legislative Index apart in terms of indices it has an algorithm built in and so the algorithm allowed me to take all of this data and give a final score so we can have three evaluators we can have 10 evaluators. But what does it all mean? How do you pull it all together? And so basically the Gender Legislative Index's algorithm operates as a series of ordered decisions. So this can be quite complicated to understand but if you think about it as a decision tree it becomes really simple so a particular evaluator might give three gender blinds and two regressives and one neutral and flow through to a final score. In this case not meeting International standards. So the way in which the algorithm operates it also operates as a decision tree and gives a final score for each law but what's a bit more special about using an algorithm is that the algorithms trained on a subset of data in the Gender Legislative Index but the algorithm doesn't know which law is being evaluated in that particular case or whether the data reflects a particular country or a particular leader was in power at the same time. The algorithm on which the data on which the algorithm is trained treats all the laws the same. And part of the reason for this is to reduce some of the subjectivity that we bring as human evaluators to a piece of legislation because we tend to evaluate certain countries better because we assume they have better laws. I've seen how evaluators tend to evaluate laws on gender-based violence more harshly than a tax law maybe because we have more experience in that field so I hope that the algorithm in the GLI brings a bit more Integrity to the final score. So with all of that tech in in the back of our minds I guess the bigger question is well what has it led to? And as Jane very kindly pointed out in the introduction um it's had an impact on the way laws are made particularly in the state of Tasmania. So a couple of years ago a minute an independent Minister um Member of Parliament, Ruth Forest, um from the Tasmania Legislative Council heard about the Gender Legislative Index and she decided to issue a motion in the Tasmanian Legislative Council for Tasmania to establish a joint sessional gender and equality committee and she started at my work saying that Australian laws shouldn't be written as if men and women are the same and that gender differences don't count and that motion was successful. So now Tasmania's Gender and Equality Audit Committee is the only state with an audit committee to look at legislation in a parliament. The ACT has one on gender and economic equality but there's no other standalone committee focused on gender at a state or federal level and that's a photo of Ruth and I on the right after she invited me to speak to the Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians. That's women parliamentarians from all state levels in the federal level to talk about the GLI. About a month ago I was very privileged to be invited by the government federal government um Department of Prime Minister and Cabinets Office for Women to go give a talk at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, the summit in Seattle. So the APEC Summit is a meeting of around 21 economies, including Australia, and Australia co-chairs a special working group with the US on women in the economy so I went over to Seattle and talked about the Gender Legislative Index and gender budgeting and the chair of that committee has now put forward the idea of gender responsive law making to the Women's Economic Equality Task Force that's reporting to our Prime Minister and I have been told it should be appearing in the new Gender Equality National Strategy and that there's a call for a federal audit of all Australian legislation from a gender perspective and hopefully a federal audit committee. So it's a bit of a watch this space but I have to personally say it's been really rewarding to see the research come off the page and have this impact on lawmaking in Australia. So I could talk uh quite endlessly about the Gender Legislative Index but I wanted to use the rest of my time to talk a little bit more generally about AI and gender because as you can see I sort of stumbled into machine learning a little bit by accident and I remember when I first started working with Mike Prussy, the data scientist at KIK, this was in 2018 to 2020, so this was pre-chat GPT and I think it's interesting that at that time I don't think many people realized just how present AI already was in our lives let alone could actually explain how it worked. I think people would have considered it a science fiction. So I found myself at this point where I understood or began to understand how machine learning worked and I was calling for agenda lens to legislation. I thought well I've got to bring this together so I started looking at what governments like Australia and a whole host of other governments who are trying to legislate on AI in a sort of race to regulate could actually do with those laws to bring into legislation agenda perspective to address some of the gender harms of AI. So I just want to talk a little bit about some of those harms and then finish up by talking about what all of us can do about them. So I think there's a lot of I would dare say scaremongering and fear online especially around the risks of um AI to gender and some of those risks are very real and I think it's important for us to acknowledge that so many of those gender-based harms of AI actually started long before AI but AI tends to replicate inequality that exists in our society for women and for gender diverse people. And so really there's two harms that people talk about a lot allocative harms and representative harms and one that I don't think gets enough attention which is knowledge inequality harms. So some of the allocative harms of AI rise from a gender perspective when decisions are made about how to allocate goods and the one that gets probably the most attention as an example is when AI driven technologies are used by banks to determine the creditworthiness of applicants and so if those AI driven technologies are trained on years of data that was denying certain women bank loans then that inequality and that discrimination risk being perpetuated by the data set meaning that certain women such as women sole heads of households or women from minority communities might continue to get denied a bank loan. Another really common example is the use of AI driven recruitment tools and these flourished after Covid because everyone started recruiting online and then they become really popular, multiple folds, and a lot of these AI driven technologies are also trained on years of CVs where men Dominate and women don't and they might actually filter out women's CVs altogether. So some of the early technologies were found to filter out off the table from consideration any CV that mentioned women even if that was women chess club champion or graduate from a women college and so they're the kind of allocative harms that affect women's lives. And there's a whole bunch of representative harms from AI that reinforce women's and gender diverse people sort of secondary status through stereotyping or under representation or denigration and there's a whole lot of examples that fall into this category one of which is deep fakes. So these fake videos that use images or videos and um present them as as videos that look very real and it's deep fake pornographic videos where women's footage has been used in a non-consensual way that are probably the most harmful ones in this category. Um but there's a whole lot of other ones it sort of suggests that it's women who are nurses and not firefighters or black men are more likely to perpetrate crimes than white men so there's also a huge racial bias that's a part of AI's um makeup as well. Another example in this field uh female voiced assistant technologies now I have a Google home and she speaks with a female voice and some people might think is it that big a deal that Siri and Cortana and Google all have female voices? Well a whole group of scholars have started writing about the ways in which those female voiced assistant technologies perpetuate stereotypes about women that we're just here to serve and what's really interesting is when technologists decide to use a male voice so IBM's Watson uses a male voice to train doctors on how to treat cancer patients. So there's a lot happening in that space and I think what's even more concerning is that some of these female voiced assistant technology allergies and female-named Bots are now being the subject of harassment. So the kind of harassment women experience in an everyday life is now being projected to female voiced assistant technologies and and is really normalising that in everyday life. So the third time I mentioned was knowledge inequality harms and I'm going to come back to that one a little bit later.  But I just having spent so long talking about the Gender Legislative Index as a tool that uses machine learning for social justice and technology for social justice I just wanted to balance it out by talking about some of these technology driven harms for women and I suppose I felt particularly alarmed last year when um my very first job at one of my first jobs in human rights which was at the Center for Reproductive Rights in New York intersected with my more recent work on AI. So some of you might have seen the news that went around when police in the U.S. were using AI driven Technologies and menstrual apps which women were using online to actually track which women were accessing abortion services in the U.S. Particularly in states in the U.S where access to safe and legal abortion is so restricted and so I think when these women's groups were suddenly saying delete your menstrual laps and 
delete all your data it's unsurprising that people are so fearful of the harms that AI can produce for women and gender diverse people. But again I also think that the goal at the end of the day has to be in seeing that good in AI and balancing it with the harm so I do want to offer three more examples because I shared the gender legislative index as my example of using AI for social justice but there are so many more and there's so much potential here if we can if we can see it and understand how to exploit the technology for gender justice. So in Spain there's an algorithm being developed called VioGén. So vio violencia and gen genero.

So gender-based violence and the algorithm is trying to help police predict when women are at risk of being re-victimised of gender-based violence. It has a lot of challenges particularly also for the perpetrators of gender-based violence but what this algorithm could mean is that police might be better able to decide oh this woman is at a heightened risk of becoming of repurpetration of violence by the perpetrator let's get her into safe housing so she's not so far down the list or the police take more seriously a violation of a protection order um against that particular victim. Buy from women is an AI driven app that actually was launched by UN women and it's being used in Haiti, Rwanda and South Africa and basically it's helping all these women farmers get access to information about to predict crop yields and have an understanding of what sort of whether

patterns are coming it's helping them access finance and access markets and particularly in countries where there's very little access to this kind of technology. And so there is a huge inequality gap between between the kind of AI knowledge we have and that exists in countries like the US and Canada and the UK and across Europe and countries in Africa in particular and this came out just last week of Tanzanian women MP started talking to Tech Giants and saying you know you just don't understand how little access to this kind of technology we have in our region of the world. So I think platforms like buy from women are really incredible not just at helping these women farmers but to bridge some of those gaps in access to AI Technologies. And then finally on the right is a snapshot from ParityBOT and I particularly love this one because as Jane mentioned my research last year and my book was on women leaders. So I spent a lot of time thinking about women in politics and there's lots of reasons why women don't really want to contest politics including risk of gender-based violence but also a lot of online harassment that women candidates face. So ParityBOT is this pretty cool tweet twitter system um when Twitter was a little bit different back in the day. But every time it detected an abusive Tweet about women in politics it would send a positive one. So either about that specific candidate or about how great it is tired women in politics generally. So I just wanted to put these three very different examples up there just to have a sense that there is good in AI it's just about harnessing that good and when we see the bad making sure that legislators are actually doing something about it. So I just want to finish by reverting back to this knowledge

inequality harm that I mentioned before and talk a little bit about the role of women in tech. So when I created the Gender Legislative Index the senior software engineer that I worked with was a woman and so I was the project manager my current collaborators however are all men all lovely wonderful hard-working committed men but they're all men. So one of the additional harms that I think is really important to write about when it comes to AI is this inequality gap in knowledge women generally have less knowledge about AI because we are underrepresented in the tech sector and that includes in leadership roles in tech. So this is a photo that was released not that long ago of Joe Biden U.S, president meeting with all the heads of U.S, tech Giants and the photo has been cut off but it actually sort of goes on. So you've got the head of Google, Microsoft Inflect AI, Anthropic, Meta, OpenAI, Amazon and I think the picture just speaks a thousand words. According to research by the world economic Forum a mere 22% of the AI Workforce is women and according to LinkedIn in Australia that's 24%. So here for every three men you only have one woman. AI is Rife with knowledge-based inequalities because women are underrepresented and we're underrepresented at the design of the deployment and at the leadership stages in AI. So as individuals and as future lawyers you have a responsibility to equip yourself with as much knowledge as possible. AI is here and it's here to stay and you can better understand its potentials and its pitfalls if you have a better sense of how it works. Last year I completed an online data science course with MIT it was extremely difficult I'm not gonna lie it was one of the hardest courses I have ever done but I felt that if I was going to talk about algorithmic bias I had to actually understand where those biases come from. I needed needed to know how much of those biases were because of the data and how much of it is because of the system and whether if you have a gender conscious designer of an AI technology you could actually fix some of that bias. Now I'm not saying we all have the time the energy the inclination or the money to become computer programmers I certainly do not but the more knowledge you can have to bridge the gap the better you may be positioned to see AI driven harms and do something about it. Whether you're fighting for tech justice on the one side or whether you're helping government agencies and Tech Giants to understand their legal responsibilities in the responsible use of technology and to deliver on those legal obligations. So if you have enjoyed hearing about my research there's more on this week for tech and social justice week. There's a webinar being held tomorrow where a bunch of my colleagues I think a dozen colleagues are coming to talk about their research on technology and to have a discussion around the social justice implications. You might also be interested in joining an industry panel that's going to be live on Thursday evening and I will be there I'm very excited about it and we're going to hear perspectives from industry professionals from Lawpath, Gilbert and Tobin, and Alumna um Rachel Polt-Cai from the Department of Education and also a speaker from the UTS's Human Technology Institute. So I look forward to seeing you face-to-face at Thursday's event but I'll just finish by saying thank you once again um to the Brennan Program for the incredible opportunity to share my thoughts with you today.

Benita: Thank you so much um I just wanted to open the floor for any questions any of you guys may have we'd love to hear from you so feel free to turn your cameras and mics on and ask away or pop your questions in the chat.

I have a question for you Ramona I can start us off. Ramona: thanks Benita.

Benita: Um how can we ensure that AI technologies are designed and implemented in a way that promotes gender equality and inclusivity rather than

exasperate existing biases and disparities sorry about that. Ramona: no I think it's a good question Benita, so how can we make sure AI doesn't perpetuate those inequalities? Well I think I've talked a little bit about the role of women in tech um and I don't think it's the solution alone. So when you look at this sort of question in politics a lot of people say well just because you'll have women in politics doesn't mean you'll suddenly get great laws and and suddenly everything positive will happen, but the research does show that in parliaments with more female legislators you do actually have better legislation in certain areas particularly around health and education and benefits for women and children and older people. So I think there is a consciousness that a woman at the table can bring they won't be there in their absence but it's not just about diversity in terms of women it's also about racial diversity it's about gender diverse people so one of the other challenges with AI is that it thinks in really binary terms and so a lot of gender diverse people feel very underrepresented. So for example if AI takes forms that you fill in in a health context if those health contacts those forms also speak in binary terms the AI also won't let individuals to self-identify as non-binary and I think AI driven technology designers can't always be aware of this if there isn't a diversity of people at the table. So I think that makes a huge difference how do you get more diverse people into AI well I think there's a lot of lessons to learn from countries that are leading the way so you know we tend to look at Europe and North America as setting the best examples but actually in Europe and North America women are only about one-third of research and development and there's other parts of the world that have done really well like Latin America and Central Asia and they've they have much higher representation of women in AI. In fact in Azerbaijan and North Macedonia 60 of research and development is women and some of the ways in which they've gotten so many women into AI and tech is they educate early. So you get AI and STEM School subjects into school and you make sure women are being taught young girls are being taught those subjects. They have quotas, they have incentives to keep women in the system, because you know, when I show that photo of Joe Biden which woman wants to have to stand with those men and defend the interests of all the women and gender diverse people who are being left behind? That's a hard gig to have and so we need to change the image of text so women actually want to be there. So I think there's lots of things we can do if you're conscious and and have the interest in doing it.

Benita: Thank you so much I think we had a few hands up but they've gone down does anyone else you can just turn your mic on and yeah answer away ask away sorry.

Anita: Can I I ask a question hello it's Anita. Um thank you so much everyone for putting this on and remember that was wonderful and so interesting um and I know as the head of the JD program there's many things that you would strongly like to see perhaps in the law curriculum. I'm just wondering about any reflections as to how we might bring tech into the law curriculum to perhaps enhance I guess perspectives on gender and the law and tech even earlier um in I guess the consciousness of students? Ramona: Well I think that's a great question thanks Anita um and thanks everybody for joining I'm only just seeing all of your most growing now because I was so focused on my slides um look I think it's interesting I teach Ethics Law And Justice and very early on in ethics and justice, I hope everybody remembers this week of readings, um we talk about the T-shaped lawyer and we talk about how important it is for um graduates of today to be much more ready and that it's not about focusing on one area of law but you need to be you need to have capacities across a vast area of laws and you need to have skill sets across a vast area and I think the expectation is that when you graduate you're going to be needing to do to engage tech and to use tech in your lawyering. And I think we actually do a pretty good job at not shying away from that reality so I also quite like the fact that we're trying to grapple with how do you use AI in our research without undermining academic integrity? Because lawyers use AI in their work they'll use AI for all sorts of things in terms of writing in terms of research and so you need these skills so I hope we're supporting our students including in the JD program to have the kind of skills that you'll need in a workforce. I suppose the other thing is that we have huge knowledge across UTS and so when I when I first started to collaborate to create the Gender Legislative Index I actually had to figure out what skills and people I needed to collaborate with. You know I knew I needed some kind of way to score the laws I needed some kind of way to bring all those scores together. But I didn't know if I needed a mathematician if I needed a data scientist I didn't even think about software engineering um and so sometimes there's you know I knocked on a lot of doors and discovered that there's a lot of skills across UTS. So maybe it's also helping our students to collaborate beyond law where the faculty engineering and Rapido's just a few floors down so maybe it's about stopping the left and other levels just to see how law can intersect with some of the other disciplines that that are that are at UTS. I will just finish by saying a couple of years ago I was asked by the UTS Women Lawyers Students to speak at a conference that was co-organized by UTS UNSW and Sydney University. And at that event I met two UTS computing science law students, so there are also a couple of you out there who have this incredible double degree where you have two of some of the best and most needed skills when you graduate so it would be lovely to hear more from our students who have those combined degrees where you're really bringing in those disciplines that are going to be so useful when you graduate. Meliana

am I pronouncing your name correctly? Meliana: yeah no that's perfect hi um so I just had a question I guess like you talked about this quite a lot as well where generally like it's like one of the core issues is that women is just underrepresented and like that kind of feeds into AI and so on but I think like in real life um like even when we're working and stuff we see you know like in the lower levels it's pretty equal like men and women but then like higher up in like executives like you really do see that like underrepresentation like so clearly and like we saw that picture with Joe Biden and of course like the heads of all of the big tech companies they're all men and like I guess my question is what do you think is the role in kind of educating and like creating alliship with men as well because I think as much as we want to kind of rule the world and like as much as we want to kind of achieve all these things by ourselves that we're not necessarily alone in our fight and like what do you think is kind of yeah the importance of like having a culture change for like the other half of the population if we think in binary terms and like how important it is that they kind of become our allies instead of becoming barriers? Ramona: I think that's a really interesting question Meliana so I'm involved in this project called the Gender Compass and it's actually um being run by Plan International and they've done this survey of two and a half thousand Australians so it's quite a small data set but they basically wanted to segment the population to get a sense of where everybody sits on gender equality. So on one hand you've kind of got about 17% and they're your trailblazers so their your Women's Champions and at the other end you sort of have 6%
which are the population that thinks actually gender equality we're there already and the issue now is discrimination against men. So I think it's really important to be conscious of the full spectrum of people and and sometimes I find my and this is where technology does you a disservice my Google News presents me such biased news that I think everybody's thinking about gender equality but it's clearly not everybody it's just what my news is feeding to me and I think we need to know there's a full spectrum of people out there and there are a lot of champions but there are also people who need to be convinced that this matters so I do think it's important important to speak to those who are in those segments that don't think gender inequality is a problem and get them on board. But I will also very clearly say and I I might be an outlier in this, but to me it is all about power and the power pie doesn't grow the power pie needs redistribution and so I think it's really important that we are trying to take back some of that power and to share that power among a diversity of people who've been marginalized which isn't always women but it can be marginalized men and marginalized women and I think it's important to have allies but to pass the mic to people who might otherwise not have had it for a really long time. So I sometimes struggle with the idea of of champions when when certain champions might actually be taking away voice from people who haven't had it for a really long time.

I'm definitely going to mispronounce your name I apologize is it Hritu. Hritu: yeah there's the hey just silence so it's just free too yeah um so I'm a first-year law and I.T. student and I was wondering how I can like do my part and encourage other women to be interested in tech as well because so many of my friends they shy away from technology because it's so male dominated and it has like that stereotype as we saw in that picture so I wanted to know how I can like encourage other women as well? Ramona: I think that's a great question Hritu and I think it's about sharing your success stories so when you've had successes in the space share them around so people know that it can be a welcoming space and if you do stay in tech I would hope that you climb up the ladder and I think one of the big parts about success for women it's bringing other people with up the ladder with you. I mean that's really what solidarity is um so if as you see other people succeed mentoring um junior scholars in the space other people whether they're in computing science or not the more you can do to help people along their journey the better and so you have a leadership role to play and you have the skills to do it so that would be my recommendation.

Jane: um Ramona there's a couple of questions in the chat I will read them to you. So the first one's from I think it's Sai. What courses would you recommend for students to gain a better understanding of AI? The MIT course is far too advanced for me. Ramona: Oh that's a good question you know I think at this stage um if before you even think about starting a course although there are plenty of short courses it's about listening to as many conversations you can have so there's a lot of news about the harms of AI and there was there was just today in the guardian another one today talking about um it was basically it started with a story of a woman who got a phone call because an AI had taken her daughter's voice and um doctored it to create an audio recording of her daughter telling her I've been kidnapped and you need to pay all of this money and I think that's they're really unhelpful stories I think that's really unhelpful news reporting. So I think you need to use your own filters when you receive this information and try to learn more and access more how do deep fakes work? You know how does how does that work to create fake imagery? How does an algorithm work? Can you correct an algorithm by taking out certain identifying features like race or gender? I think if you can start to answer these questions you can slowly start to understand how the technology works and then you can use your own filters when you sort of receive this information that I think isn't that helpful in in promoting and more considered understanding of AI

I'm just going to call on Sai and then maybe Jane if you had another question from the chat. 
Sai: No thank you so much Ramona for the insight that's what's going to ask you so what sort of short courses then like would you recommend then? Because like from my understanding in terms of the AI I know it's based upon large data sets and LLMs
so then at that point how do you even control what is being fed into the AI so for those who don't know LLM so we're talking about Large Language Models where you can use huge data sets to read pieces of legislation but LLMs also have this issue where there's a lot of gendered assumptions even simply things like Mr appears before Mrs

um in the ordering or "son of his" before "daughter". Um so I think you know UTS has a lot of short courses in their space as well but we also have a lot of excellent law tech subjects where you can not only gain the AI and the technology but you can also understand what it is that you need to do about it from a legal perspective. What can you do about it from a legal perspective. And I think there's a lot of work to be done in this space that you can do with your own skill sets as future lawyers um so right now a lot of countries are creating laws to regulate AI Australia is considering regulation and AI and we're also reviewing existing legislations. Everything from privacy to product liability um right through to whether the new Human Rights Act can actually do something about protecting the interests of those who are most affected so right in within your own skill set there are a lot of things you can do. You know what are the laws that you think need to be in place? How can you revisit some of the laws that you studied from an AI perspective?Bbecause some of you might have done these subjects in understanding you know what part can law play so there are a lot of short courses but I also don't want to steer you away from from the skills you have at hand that can really make a huge contribution in the in the AI tech and regulation space.

Benita: um I think we have uh one more question from the chat

um Miriam I think it was "How effective are
quotas in achieving gender equality in STEM?" Ramona: Um you know I think Australia has generally not really turned to quotas very much you know we're one of the few um countries around the world that don't even have quotas in politics obviously the labor party has quotas within the party system but in many countries especially in our region they have been hugely successful in increasing the number of women in politics. Um and so I would say the same model can work in STEM and it's not that that alone is the solution you know if women are entering into industries that are difficult to survive in that are difficult to lead in a quota alone won't address the issue, but it can help to balance it out so that the women who are in that space have other women to learn from, other women to watch lead, other women to help identify some of those excluded or marginalized or harms by some of these technologies so I think quotas have a huge role to play.

Benita: I think we can wrap up in terms of the Q&A so on behalf of the UTS faculty of Law UTS Law Students' Society and all the students here tonight I'd like to thank Ramona for sharing her knowledge comments and amazing work in creating the Gender Legislative Index and how it has impacted the Tasmanian Legislative Council and hopefully can translate to law making on a federal level even on an international level soon. So in light of the immense debate surrounding AI and tech I think this discussion was extremely timely and important in this current context we thank you for providing your invaluable insights and facilitating a thought-provoking discussion on modern tech and how it can manifest in our society. From how it can assess legislation from a gender lens but also can result in gender-based harms, the good and the bad and obviously the works in progress so thank you again. Before we head off uh just a reminder to everyone all your participants out there you'll receive five ROJ for the Brennan Program by attending this event. Please keep an eye out for our LSS public speaking competition that we are doing in collaboration with the Public Speaking 
Society. The rounds start in the coming weeks and the Grand Final is on October the 3rd where we'll have some high profile guests like Jahan Kalanta the little guy lawyer from Tic Toc. He's also a Brennan Program Alumni. Andrew Flannery from the Speakers Institute and the UTS Dean of Law the GOAT. So super exciting stuff is happening also as you guys may know this event is one of the few incredible events in Tech + Social and Justice. W eek we encourage you to become a Champion for Change. You can do that by attending events in Tech + Social Justice week you get to think big you get inspired by events such as this one and you share your ideas in 20 words or less and create a video and post it on LinkedIn. This is an incredible opportunity that UTS law offers and it's so incredibly unique and for more information there will be a link in the chat from Crystal.

There's a link um so yeah get involved in Tech and social justice week as much as you can. It's super rewarding and enlightening and like I've said before, very timely.

Thank you again to everyone for attending tonight I think we'll wrap it up there. Ramona: Thanks everyone. Jane: Thanks so much Ramona.