Just nine out of 116 AI professionals in films are women, study finds
A relentless stream of movies, from Iron Man to Ex Machina, has helped entrench systemic gender inequality in the artificial intelligence industry by portraying AI researchers almost exclusively as men, a study has found.
The overwhelming predominance of men as leading AI researchers in movies has shaped public perceptions of the industry, the authors say, and risks contributing to a dramatic lack of women in the tech workforce.
Beyond the impact on gender balance, the study raises concerns about the knock-on effects of products that favour male users because they are developed by what the former Microsoft employee Margaret Mitchell called “a sea of dudes”.
“Given that male engineers have repeatedly been shown to engineer products that are most suitable for and adapted to male users, employing more women is essential for addressing the encoding of bias and pejorative stereotypes into AI technologies,” the report’s authors write.
Researchers at the University of Cambridge reviewed more than 1,400 films released between 1920 and 2020 and whittled them down to the 142 most influential movies featuring artificial intelligence. Their analysis identified 116 AI professionals. Only nine of these were women, of which five worked for a man or were the child or partner of a more senior male AI engineer.
The study highlights films such as the 2008 Avengers movie Iron Man, which depicts a stereotypical lone male genius who has mastered so many skills that he can synthesise an element and solve the problem of time travel “in one night”. In Alex Garland’s 2014 movie Ex Machina, another lone genius is so successful that he rises above the norms of ethics and law to subject an employee to violence while amusing himself with sex bots.
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