Keys to a More Equitable Future of Work: A Fireside Chat with Eve Psalti, Google & Maria Alvarez, Microsoft
Sharing key takeaways from our recent conversation on International Women’s Day with two industry trailblazers.
Meet Maria & Eve — leaders at the forefront of technological and cultural transformation.
Maria and Eve shared their personal stories — both as immigrants to the US with limited language skills and access to opportunity.
Over a 30-year career in the US after her childhood in Venezuela, Maria has managed a $1B budget at Yahoo, coached CEOs and CTOs, and today is General Manager of Microsoft’s cutting-edge AI & Research Division, as well as a number of Diversity & Inclusion initiatives within and beyond Microsoft — including the creation of two scholarships for underrepresented groups in STEM.
Eve is a business and thought leader on the future of education and work in STEM (featured at TedX and many other forums), who guides Google’s Strategic Platforms towards innovative digital transformation. She formerly led global strategy for Microsoft’s flagship education programs in 119 countries reaching more than 220 million students and 12 million educators that accelerate technology adoption, driving strong learning outcomes.
As we empower machines to make decisions that were previously made by humans, there are certain key questions to address.
Maria asks us, “How will we ensure AI systems we’re designing are not biased? Everything in AI starts with the training of data. How will we ensure we’re representing the entire world and not specific areas?”
Maria is at the forefront of the $1.2 trillion dollar AI industry that is “trying to emulate intelligent human behavior,” and because of this, she urges us to “use the AI to be more empathetic.” Eve speaks to the same end goal — more responsible systems — through the lens of integrating more women into the “T” to avoid issues like bias in the algorithms we’re creating.
They share an example of a big tech company that created a system with fantastic intent: to realize the top candidates for any given role, from a set of thousands of resumes. And yet, women and underrepresented populations were negatively impacted, because the training data used only included employees’ resumes over the past fifteen years: a predominantly white male demographic.
Other key areas to address include creating systems that are safe and secure, as well as those that can offer explainability: “How do we know the driverless car doesn’t go to a road that doesn’t exist? Or that AI in healthcare has the necessary tools to diagnose a patient accurately?” Thirdly, Maria emphasizes the importance of systems that can solve real problems and offer explainability: “Humans want to know why you made that decision, and another human can offer that.”
Skills in STEM are no longer optional, and we need creativity more than ever in our future leaders.
Computational thinking is an increasingly integral part of the fabric of most future roles. Eve reminds us that while lower level jobs might go away, the velocity of new jobs coming into the market will overshadow losses, bringing more highly skilled and valued jobs with better pay and paths to opportunity, with science and engineering jobs earning 2x the median income in the US.
As Eve states, “STEAM is not an option. You can’t say, ‘I’m not good at math’ or ‘I don’t have the inclination.’ If you don’t have computational thinking as a baseline skill, you won’t find a job. Computational thinking is the evergreen baseline ingredient that all of us need to have.”
At the same time, she speaks to how the increased proliferation of AI and machine learning (ML) drives a stronger need for bold leaders with collaboration and communication skills, who can lead an enterprise to success, set meaningful goals, and collaborate with others on partnerships — reinforcing the importance of both disruptive technical skills and soft skills such as emotional intelligence and critical thinking.
Microsoft and Google both offer a number of programs to help educate and bring more people into tech around the world, from programs for women to former military, and from Computer Science engineers to roles that don’t require formal education and can allow for training on the job.
The future is coming fast, and we need everyone we can get.
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