On Nov. 11, women in STEM organizations across NYU’s campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi and Shanghai held their first collaborative event: the NYU Women in Tech Speaker Series. The event was hosted by Women in Computing and Steminist at NYU New York and weSTEM at NYU Abu Dhabi and Shanghai. The first speaker in the series was Meredith Broussard, data journalism professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who spoke on technochauvinism and gender bias in tech.

Broussard, whose work focuses primarily on artificial intelligence in investigative reporting, is renowned for her creation Bailiwick, a tool designed to uncover data-driven campaign finance stories, created for the 2016 United States presidential election. Previously, she had been Features editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer and a software developer at the AT&T Bell Labs and the MIT Media Lab. Her work has been featured in many outlets including The Atlantic, Harper’s Magazine and Slate Magazine.

The Gazelle reached out to weSTEM co-presidents Simran Parwani, Class of 2021, and Tina Krulec, Class of 2021, who represented one of the organizations involved in hosting the event.

“She is just a woman that I admire immensely and I have been following her research for a while,” said Parwani, who suggested having her on the speaker series. “She’s one of the only people in the field doing what she does … in the world of big tech and ethics.”

Broussard began her talk by reading the first few pages of her book, Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World, where she shared her journey into the tech space and how she encountered technochauvinism and gender bias.

Recalling one of her first presents, a robot, she expressed feeling restricted by the limits of technology. “I learned a few things while making this robot. I learned how to use tools to build technology and that building things can be fun. I discovered that my imagination was powerful but that the reality of technology couldn’t measure up to what I imagined,” she said.

These lessons later translated into the real world when she started programming for computers as an undergraduate at Harvard University— the failures in and limitations of systems would not allow her programs to work the way she imagined them to be. She grew sceptical to claims that tech would save the world and change it for the better.

This scepticism led her into thinking more about technochauvinism — an idea that tech is superior to people. Broussard emphasized that this concept is linked to the rampant gender bias in tech. She suggested that most of the ideas about the future of tech and its role in society comes from a small group of people, who apart from being mathematicians who were educated at Oxbridge or Ivy League institutions, “are also all white men.”

The biases these men have — Broussard explains — gets embedded into the technologies they create. “People have unconscious bias … Inside scientific bias, there are a lot of systemic biases and gender bias is one of the most common and obvious to spot,” she said.

These biases seeped into the real world beyond the code on computer screens: “I saw the digital world replicate the inequalities of the real world,” Broussard shared, discussing the low representation of women, especially women from marginalized communities, in tech and the harassment they face in cyberspace, including the “rape threats and obscene photos” women receive in online dating apps.

Technochauvinism and gender bias go hand in hand, and they manifest themselves into the day to day life experiences of women. Broussard shared feeling isolated in her undergraduate years, being one of the only six women majoring in Computer Science in a class of 20,000 undergraduates.

“I felt isolated in all of the textbook ways that cause women to drop out of STEM careers … I felt what was broken for me, for other women, but I didn’t have the power to fix it, [so] I switched my major.”

She did eventually take up a job as a computer scientist, but later quit to become a journalist: “I wasn’t happy because no one looked like me, talked like me.”

She, however, made another return to the field and is now a professor, researcher and author in the field of data journalism.

Krulec shared that she appreciated the nuances Broussard delved into, especially in the Q&A session. “[The highlight for me was] her advice at the end … She said something along the lines of “You are talented, no one can tell you otherwise.” It sounds so basic but it really isn’t. Imposter syndrome is one of the biggest things that women in STEM [experience]. It was nice to get validated by someone as high profile as [her].”

The talk ended with a Q&A session, where Broussard answered questions on topics ranging from navigating job applications as a woman to strategies for fixing gender bias in the work space, a problem that continues to be unaddressed in STEM.

The event was attended by around 40 members of the NYU community.

Parwani shared her concerns regarding the audience: “I am a little worried … that people that were in attendance were people from these women in STEM organizations. For us, technochauvinism and gender bias in tech is something that we live everyday. So, I feel that the people that needed to be there at this event weren’t there.”

She added, “Another haunting part was when [Broussard] asked [if we] study these [biases] in [our] classes. It broke my heart to say … how our CS education is so limited here at NYUAD. We don’t study the biases in these products that we are learning to build and in that regard we are perpetuating them.”