Event: Gender, AI and MERL Working Group meeting focusing on gender inclusion and GenAI

In early 2025, the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) hosted our inaugural Gender, AI and MERL Working Group meeting. Since then, we’ve been eager to continue the amazing conversations that started to emerge in that space. So we are very happy to announce we are hosting an event with Gender, AI and MERL Working Group co-lead, Savita Bailur, and gender and inclusion specialist Medhavi Hassija about gender inclusion in GenAI. 

Back in March, Savita and Medhavi shared “Gender Inclusion in GenAI: Why Does It Matter?”, a paper examining how GenAI impacts women’s participation in key areas, notably economic empowerment, healthcare, and safety and security, while highlighting the urgent need to address biases, technology-facilitated gender-based violence, and digital divides that could further deepen existing inequalities. 

For this event, we are inviting Savita and Medhavi to share their insights with the group, followed by a collective conversation about opportunities and challenges related to gender inclusion in GenAI, gender (and other) biases are embedded in the data and design of AI tools (and their application!), and recent cultural and policy shifts are influencing or impacting our work. 

This Gender, AI and MERL Working Group meeting is taking place on June 05, at 10am ET/7:30pm IST. Register here to participate. 

About our speakers: 

• Savita Bailur is an independent gender and digital economies researcher. As a core collaborator at MERL Tech Initiative, she also co-leads the Gender, AI and MERL Working Group. She has experience working with organizations such as Caribou Digital, Gates Foundation and Mastercard Foundation. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s SIPA, where she teaches digital development.
• Medhavi Hassija is a gender and inclusion specialist with a Master’s in Public Administration from Columbia University’s SIPA, where she specialized in development economics, data analytics, and feminist policy research. Her professional experiences span organisations such as UNICEF, UNDP, NITI Aayog, and Pratham Education Foundation. 

Please note this session is focussed on the “R” part of MERL – researching the impact of GenAI – rather than the monitoring, evaluation or learning per se. We would be keen to hear your experiences on each of the MERL elements with GenAI and gender as you encounter these in your work.

This session is part of our NLP-CoP. In case you’re not part of the community yet, please learn more and sign up here.