99 Startups Monthly Newsletter - December 2024
Is AI helping reduce gender inequality?
Over the past months, we have heard that Artificial Intelligence has arrived to reduce the gender gap that we have always seen worldwide.
We hear benefits such as bias detection to improve hiring and promotions; tools to analyze employee sentiment based on bias in HR practices and salary inequality; and security against gender-based harassment and cybercrime.
Despite this being true, we need to keep in mind that the world has a gender equality problem, and Artificial Intelligence mirrors the gender bias in our society. Who develops AI, and what kind of data it is trained on, has gender implications for AI-powered solutions.
According to Revelio Labs, there’s a huge gender imbalance in the AI labor market around the world. This imbalance is significantly more pronounced in AI talent than in other professions.
Natacha Sangwa, a student who participated in the first coding camp organized under the African Girls Can Code Initiative (AGCCI) last year in Rwanda, highlighted the importance of having gender equality across tech jobs, especially AI jobs, to use them in favor of gender equality. She stated the following: “I have noticed that it is mostly developed by men and trained on datasets that are primarily based on men. This results in AI systems that sometimes fail to relate to women. For instance, when women use some AI systems to diagnose illnesses, they often receive inaccurate answers because the AI is not aware of symptoms that may present differently in women.”
We need to keep this in mind and try to create more opportunities for women in this field. For us to leverage AI and close the gender gap, we need to ensure that women have the opportunity to train the same AI models, or at least, people need to make sure that the models trained by men are not biased by their own beliefs.
News about our portfolio companies:
Cashea is incorporated into Arturos, the first restaurant chain in Venezuela to do it.
Saptiva's Artificial Intelligence tools are used for educational purposes.
Great companies we have recently reviewed:
Wisecricket: a B2B SaaS platform for automated, real-time auditing of financial transactions and supporting evidence.
Felz: a network of hyper-local mini-markets in Latin America.
Conectamos: a decentralized, AI-powered logistics network transforming last-mile delivery in Latin America by empowering local operators.
Recommendations of the month:
Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms - Jeffrey Bussgang. Jeffrey, who has played on both sides of the VC market, shares his most important learnings on how to manage your raising processes along with potential VCs.
Can Venture Capital Be Optimized for Happiness? - James Dudfield, Sara Olsen, Aaron Mallett, Jed Emerson and Eric Ng.