Event: Detecting gender bias in AI tools

On November 13, 10am ET/4pm CET the Gender, MERL and AI Working Group at the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) is hosting a session on detecting gender bias in AI tools. Anyone is welcome to join! RSVP here.

We are inviting two practitioners to share their experiences on detecting gender bias in AI tools for the next Gender, MERL and AI Working Group meeting. We will hear from Annie Brown (from reliable.ai) about data annotation and how bias can become embedded early on in the AI process and from Kamila Wasilkowska (from Gender Insights) about detecting bias in using LLMs for qualitative research analysis.

Gender bias in AI often begins at the data annotation layer, where human judgments shape how machine learning models interpret the world. When annotators label text, images, or behaviors through the lens of societal stereotypes, those biases become embedded in training data and replicated at scale. In this session, Annie Brown will showcase real examples of sexist classifier outcomes and explore how participatory annotation and bias-aware QA can build more inclusive and accountable AI systems. 

Kamika Wasilkowska will share findings from their work testing LLMs for qualitative data analysis. During the event, Kamilla will share bias detection in qualitative coding, and the pros and cons of using AI for gender, diversity, and inclusion programs and the “how to” steps they followed in testing both models and prompts. 

Get to know our speakers: 

• Annie Brown is a data scientist, AI bias researcher at UC San Diego, and entrepreneur specializing in algorithmic fairness and responsible AI. She is the Founder and CEO of Reliabl, an AI infrastructure startup backed by New Media Ventures and Techstars. Her research has been presented at NeurIPS and ICML, and she previously founded Lips, a platform for women and LGBTQIA+ creators that grew to 50,000 users.
• Kamila Wasilkowska is a gender, diversity, and MEAL expert based in Mexico City. She runs Gender Insights, a gender-MEAL consulting business, and brings over 15 years of gender-focused MEAL expertise across East Africa, the MENA region, and Latin America, having served as a Senior MEAL Adviser to UNDP, UN Women, UKAID, FCDO, IRC, and Care International across 16 countries.