We are so proud of what we have accomplished over last three years with the Feminist AI Research Network. Continue reading and download our executive summary to learn about our impact, the projects we have funded and our main learnings and recommendations from these three years of work on advancing Feminist AI.
The Feminist AI Research Network, FA+IR, was created to springboard from descriptions of ‘why’ and ‘what’, to applied research on ‘how’ new Feminist AI and Automated Decision Making (ADM) data, algorithms, models, and systems could concretely and positively impact social / gender justice, improve quality of life, and correct for historic exclusion.
FA+IR aims to to create new tools in order to transform old systems. We investigate, validate, prototype and pilot research hypotheses using multidisciplinary teams, design justice principles, meaningful community engagement, and public and private sector partnership aligned with our regional and global approach.
Our impact
Over 2021-2024, FA+IR has spread the idea of Feminist AI to expand the collective vision beyond critical work on Gender Based Violence (the floor) to a vision of a world where new opportunities abound (the ceiling), and women, girls and marginalized communities are equal partners in decision-taking and tools-making.
Feminist AI: Artificial Intelligence harnessed to deliver equality outcomes, designed with inclusion at the core, creating new opportunities for proactive, innovative correction of inequities.
Quality Research
Using the FA+IR Paper → Prototype → Pilot Methodology across regions to create multiple pathways multi-stakeholder human rights-based approaches and design justice principles, new multidisciplinary teams of technologists and social scientists collaborated with communities who became an essential part of the co-creation process. This approach enabled ways to make sure the technology meets the needs of women, girls and most marginalized others in vulnerable communities.
9 stand alone papers funded:
- Inclusive Public Policy Design for Data Science Projects (Mexico)
- Analyzing Public Procurement Anomalies with a Gender Perspective (Ecuador)
- Work Related Diseases: An Annotated Corpus to Evaluate Sex Differences (Chile)
- Reimagining Automated Violence Interventions & Participatory Technology Design (India)
- Gendered language sets in Thai’s service sectors (Thailand)
- MENA Languages & Feminist Data: Towards Building Feminist AI Tools (Egypt)
- Preventing Child Marriage: Incubating Evidence-based Policy & Advocacy Approaches (Indonesia)
- Trafficking in the ASEAN Region: Trauma-informed digital connections to legal services for trafficking survivors (Thailand)
- Compost Engineers and their slow knowledge (Brazil)
4 papers → prototype conceived:
- La Independiente: Mainstreaming Gender Perspective in AI Crowd Work in the Global South (Mexico)
- Towards a feminist framework for developing AI: from principles to practice (Chile)
- Community Perspectives of AI in Natural Resource Governance (Mexico)
- Explainable AI-Based Tutoring System for Upper Egypt Community Schools (Egypt)
5 papers → prototype → pilot created:
- SafeHer Transit: What Women Want in their AI-Powered Safety App(The Philippines)
- E.D.I.A. A tool to explore natural language processing software to identify biases and stereotypes (Argentina)
- AymurAI: Measuring Gender Based Violence in Latin America(Argentina)
- SOF+IA: GenAI chatbot to dialogue and address situations of violence and digital harassment that women, of any age, often experience on digital social media platforms. (Chile)
- AI & Equality: A Human Rights Toolbox, Course & Community
Lessons Learned
- Baseline on Feminist AI Since no one knows what Feminist AI is, and as it can and could be many things to many people, the baseline concepts of gender justice, JEDI, Design Justice, all need to be shared. The inclusion of workshops for prospective/new grantees on intersectional, feminist issues proved essential to develop a common vision, train AI developers on feminist principles and create the foundation for systematizing learnings from previous cohorts on methodologies : Community Engagement principles are critical for teams to be able to ideate and create Feminist AI as a multidisciplinary approach as team members are coming from different perspectives with different vocabularies.
- Genuine Community involvement Community engagement is sine qua non to this process: More research could be done on how to effectively reach out to and then create and validate methodologies to fully and meaningfully engage communities in the co-creation of new and emerging technologies that serve the needs of the community and the most marginalized.
- Bi Weekly meetings proved to have great impact encouraging teams to move forward in the compressed timeline, avoid less useful avenues of investigation and produce highly regarded research published in global journals, presented at prestigious conferences, and garner further funding from the institutions such as McGovern Foundation, Mozilla, etc : Bi Weekly meetings not only built trust but also strong relationships within the larger network, transforming grantor-grantee relationships into a critical community of researchers and technologists that value collaboration and bold experimentations.
- Creative freedom for researchers is key and the close alignment with expressions of interest into papers, prototypes and pilots allowed for researchers to make significant progress vis à vis the bi weekly meetings on one hand, and to have the freedom to experiment, ideate and pivot their means and methods on the other hand.
- Funding Not every project prototype or pilot needs the same amounts of funding. A more effective method was found in Cohort IV when funding was linked to fully formed prototype / pilot work plans and budget. Some projects needed more funding to be effective, others less.
Recommendations
Engagement and advocacy:
- Build on the momentum of the validated paper – prototype- pilot methodology
- Give visibility to the utility of the technologies built
- Showcase the network’s feminist AI research, tools, frameworks and debate to a wider audience
- Expand the Global Directory through a dedicated global communication campaign, highlighting the groundbreaking work undertaken by feminist leaders in the global majority, to allow the community to build partnerships across the world.
- Increase the capacity of the global coordination team with a new further emphasis on African and Asian talent and practitioners.
- Enhance introduction of feminist AI with humanities, gender, social protection, and policy communities.
- Continue to socialize gender-transformative approaches and feminist AI to technical and computer science communities.
- Be sensitive to the reality that academics are rewarded when they publish in their specific discipline’s journals. Be aware that multidisciplinary approaches are not highly rewarded currently. This is a continuing obstacle.
Partnerships, Collaborations and Capacity Building:
- Continue offering modules about technical concepts and terminologies to interdisciplinary teams (In addition to SAC innovation social science capacity building workshops). This would support teams’ to develop the prototype proposal, and embark on the prototype development phase.
- Develop the AI & Equality Human Rights Toolbox, further tailoring it to specific regional contexts, p.ex, African contextwith ground examples and experiences. The latter can work alongside the Africa outreach strategy and build further on the learnings and outcomes from the Incubating Feminist AI grant.
- Systematize informal and formal meetings with relevant institutions and boundary partners. This may set the grounds for co-creation to involve the partners identified in the original Incubating Feminist AI proposal (e.g. trade unions, municipalities, national commissions); and to present solutions (Digital Public Infrastructure work may be one such collaborative opportunity).
Outreach and funding:
- Open opportunities for funding further papers, prototypes and pilots with interdisciplinary outlooks and approaches. Explore multiple publishing avenues and formats: peer-reviewed articles, op-eds, news articles, and creative essays in addition to podcasts and webinars. It’s important for the network to exist beyond the academy, and to socialize its jargon and approach to developing feminist technologies with communities that can benefit.
- A broader grassroot and outreach to policy makers, feminists, digital rights and activists, human rights defenders, critical and responsible AI institutions will build visibility and generate new partnerships with researchers, civil society, and government stakeholders.
- widen the dissemination of knowledge to showcase the network’s applied research, and debate to a general public audience. To do this, the network may consider funding a communications strategy/campaign.