Join us for the Gender, MERL and AI Working Group meeting kick-off!
Are you AI curious as well as AI critical, and ready to collectively dive in and unpack the good, bad, promising, and scary aspects at the intersection of gender and MERL and AI?
The Natural Language Processing Community of Practice is kicking off our Gender, MERL and AI Working Group on January 29th! Join us for this meeting if you’d like to further explore ways that researchers and evaluators working on intersectional gender issues are thinking about AI for MERL and the MERL of AI.
Why a Gender, MERL, and AI Working Group?
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to raise the hype and stakes for all, researchers and evaluators working on intersectional, gender issues and programs are facing the pressure to adopt or be left behind. The promise of AI tells of gains to efficiency, efficacy and even opportunities to scale work at lower costs, for which many in our sector are creatively (and maybe even secretly) experimenting. Yet, the preceding decades of experience with technologies and data practices that are extractive, inappropriate, costly, disempowering, or causing real-world harm has many in the gender work camp leading important work and conversations to slow down or stop widespread use.
A growing number of gender researchers and evaluators, however, are squarely in the middle: AI curious while AI critical, and ready to collectively dive in to the good, bad, promising, and scary. Practitioners from this sector have a unique perspective about the importance, opportunities, and risks AI may bring to the work and importantly the often-marginalized stakeholders they work with. We aim to expand the conversation beyond the inevitability of AI, to discuss, imagine, and test ways to make AI advancements advance our collective research and evaluation work on gender; or to critique and resist those that do not.
Draft Working Group Objectives:
- Foster a community that engages, shares, and critiques AI through a gender lens and from practical experience
- Share real cases and examples of AI use in MERL of gender programs
- Provide resources and support to adopting, testing, and evaluating AI in MERL work for gender programs
- Intentionally connect with other Working Groups in the wider CoP offering opportunities to learn from and share and to bring a gender lens to the wider CoP and its work.
Join us on January 29th, 10-11.30ET to shape the goals of the working group!
The Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) (hosted by The MERL Tech Initiative) is launching the Gender + AI working group, with a focus on monitoring, evaluation, research and learning (MERL) to collectively and critically explore, share, and test AI in the gender sector, or working on intersectional gender programs or evaluations.
At this first Working Group meeting, co-led by Allison Sambo, Global Fund for Women, and Savita Bailur, Gender Equity and Social Inclusion expert, we will develop a shared agenda for the group. For example, we could address topics like:
- How can AI be incorporated in participatory evaluation processes?
- What tools, specifically, offer the greatest security for sensitive information?
- How do we incorporate a gender lens when evaluating LLM performance as part of an evaluation strategy?
We will also take direction from WG members on their preferred modalities for meeting, communicating, learning and collaborating, such as report outs, case studies, discussions, or live demonstrations.
We invite researchers, evaluators, analysts, and data scientists, across sectors, working on gender issues to join us for our first discussion, January 29th at 10am ET. We hope to see you there!
Register now
We hope you’ll join us on January 29th at 10am ET for this important session. Register here!
As always, you can catch up on previous event resources in our public folder. And if you’re not already a member, be sure to join the NLP CoP here, tick the Gender, MERL and AI Working Group on the sign-up form.