Patricia Gestoso, is an award-winning technologist and inclusion strategist with over 20 years of experience in digital transformation with a focus on client service, artificial intelligence, and inclusive and ethical design of technology and workplaces.
Patricia will be giving a talk about the impact of AI on the workplace and workers at the Women in Tech Festival in October. We do hope you’ll be able to join us.
In the meantime, we caught up with Patricia and asked her to give us a taster.
As a Director of Support for a scientific and engineering software corporation, I see how AI helps our customers everyday to accelerate drug discovery, clinical trials and research on new materials.
On the flip side, as an inclusion strategist and collaborator on initiatives such as the Race and AI toolkit and Better Images of AI, I’m also aware about the different ways in which AI helps encode and automate biases.
That’s the reason why in the last three years I’ve been actively fostering discussion about the benefits and challenges that AI brings to inclusion, equity, and sustainability on social media as well as through keynotes and articles.
It’s important to take a step back and see where those predictions of women more likely to be negatively affected in the next wave of automation. They come from several assumptions.
First, that there are certain sectors that will be more impacted than others. Then, that the impact on those sectors will be negative on the less skilled workers, next that those workers are women, and finally, that people prefer to interact with machines than with humans.
On the flip side, we have other studies that tell us that the most impacted will be white collar workers like software engineers – who are overwhelming men – or lawyers – where which gender is overrepresented depends on the practice area.
In case this was not contradictory enough, we’re also told that the roles that AI won’t displace will be those that are related to soft skills and studies show that women are great at those – collaboration, listening, and championing a common plan.
