Many of us study history without realising one important truth:
everything that we know about humanity until now is only half of what
really happened. Often in fact, the stories of men have been presented
as a representation of all human beings, completely leaving out the
female point of view. This phenomenon is called male bias, and it lies
at the foundation of the gender gap, meaning the lack of data about the
experiences, points of view and necessities of women. Concepts such as
these are even more important in a time such as ours, where big data and
artificial intelligence are becoming ever more important, and regulate
every aspect of our lives.
The big data supplied to artificial
intelligence or input into our computers can in fact be contaminated by
gender bias, and usually we do not even know about it, because
artificial intelligence is often created privately, and so is not
subject to any checks by government bodies or by ordinary people. If in
most cases this bias leads to various levels of discomfort for women,
for example installing a high shelf, or keeping the office temperature
too high because the thermostat is based on male data, in others it can
put their lives in danger, such as when heart attack symptoms are not
diagnosed in time because the heart monitoring system does not cover
female cardiac anomalies, due to it having been set up for men.
The
fact is that men tend to shape the world in their image, and they do
not have a female body, they are not subject to the burden of having to
assist family members, or of unpaid work, and they are not the victims
of deliberate violence in the same way as women are, so they tend not to
see these problems. This oversight is not deliberate or malicious, it
is simply a lack of attention that leads to bigger problems for women
who live in an increasingly unequal and unjust world. This becomes even
more serious when the female category is mixed with any other minority
group: where the data for women are scarce and often ignored, they are
practically nonexistent when it comes to say, women of colour or with
any kind of disability.
