International Women’s Day 2023 at Ufonia
This year’s general theme for International Women’s Day (IWD) is embracing equity, while the United Nations and UN Women are celebrating under the theme DigitALL: Innovation and technology for gender equality.
At Ufonia this theme resonates with us as we reflect on our pledge from last year whilst looking forward to how we can do more in 2023.
Reflection on the last 12 months
It has been a year since writing the blog for IWD ’22 Break the bias where our focus was on raising awareness of the importance of addressing the gender gap in healthcare and we pledged:
“At Ufonia we’re using technology to build the future of healthcare, providing increased access for everyone. We’ve built a gender balanced company and will continue to #BreakTheBias by encouraging the amazing female members of our team to showcase their work and encourage other women to follow them to transform the health tech industry.”
— Dr Nick de Pennington, CEO & Founder
So how far have we actually come?
We have continued to cultivate a balanced, diverse team at Ufonia and sought phenomenal opportunities for the women in our team to share what we are doing to transform healthcare with others:
- Our team members have been showcasing their work around the world and gaining new opportunities for development and learning on national and international conferences and programmes.
- Our team has been able to attract more female team members with 75% of new hires being female in the past year.
Our Medical Director Aisling Higham presented our international work with colleagues from Maastricht UMC+, The Chinese University of Hong Kong and University of Toronto at The European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeons (ESCRS).
Sarah Khavandi (Clinical Fellow at Ufonia) and Aisling Higham from our team have both been awarded places on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme - joining 3 other members of the company on the programme (Nick de Pennington, Ernest Lim, and Katrina Mason).
Mohita Chowdhury, Senior AI Research Engineer, shared some of our team’s machine learning research at the Oxford Women in Computer Science (OxWoCS) conference and she also attended NeurIPS 2022, where she presented two posters on the healthcare AI work we’ve been doing.
In addition, over the last year we have continued to remind ourselves of the importance of the work we are doing to improve accessibility within healthcare. We have been working with Patient and Public Involvement groups from a variety of backgrounds such as seldom herd and underrepresented communities and this includes women from different walks of life. These groups help inform everything from product, to research focus and strategy.
We are currently working with the Institute for Safe Autonomy at the University of York to build a case for Ethical Assurance in the use of Dora our clinical automated assistant. As part of this work we have to consider the ethical implications of our technology on a variety of stakeholders and how this might generate biases for particular groups so we can ensure that we mitigate for them.
We have also been working on a women’s health conversation which will be released at the end of this quarter… keep an eye out! If you want to find out more about our work check our website https://ufonia.com/ and if you want to keep up with Ufonia’s news follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Instagram.
2023 commitment
For this year we are going to build on last year’s work by committing to assess and publish metrics of the diversity of our team and our users. Our CEO, Nick, says:
“Ensuring that we promote and develop the talents of all, our team has been integral to Ufonia’s growth over the last year. Now with the team expanding and the numbers of users we serve increasing each week, we want to ensure we track our commitment to inclusion. To do this from 2023 onwards we are going to objectively measure and publish the diversity of our team as well as our users. In this way we hope to hold ourselves to a high standard and ensure that we are developing truly inclusive technological innovation.”
Why do we celebrate IWD?
International Women’s Day (IWD) aims to celebrate the social, economic, cultural and political achievements of women around the world. IWD also marks “a call to action for accelerating gender parity.” Thanks to the hard work of women and men around the world there has been incredible progress in women’s rights since the first IWD in 1911, but there is still work to be done in order to accomplish gender equity. Although we can celebrate many things in terms of equity, there are still gaps in areas such as tech where women make up 26% of the workforce and specifically AI where women make up only 22% of the workforce globally.
As a team we want to celebrate the women of Ufonia, not only on International Women’s Day, but every day of the year. Our annual IWD article is discussed with the whole team and we get everyone together to think about our commitments to gender parity. Setting clear goals within our team has enabled us to create a culture that promotes Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion both in the workplace and the product itself.
More information and resources
There are so many resources concerning gender equality and women empowerment in the workspace, which may seem chaotic especially for start-ups. Several organisations provide useful resources about gender equity in the workspace and in particular for the tech industry; here are some examples: Women in Tech, Women in Voice, LeanIn.
About IWD 2023
The following links contain information about IWD, this year’s theme and the history behind the day:
This article was co-authored by Dr Sarah Khavandi and Nikoletta Ventoura.
