US-based multinational Google is collaborating with Saudi Authority for Data and Artificial Intelligence (SADAI) to unveil a global initiative named ‘Elevate’ which will focus on technology, precisely in Artificial Intelligence (AI), to overcome gender inequality.
Elevate strives to make women knowledgeable in tech and science by providing free accessibility and training in the sectors and also reduce the gender gap and empowering more than 25,000 women worldwide in the coming 5 years.
On the technical track, 30 percent of the program trainees will be data engineers, cloud architects, Ml engineers, and data scientists. Meanwhile, the rest of the 70 percent of the program trainees will be from the non-technical track Cloud Business Enthusiast.
According to Princess Haifa Bint Abdul Aziz Al-Muqrin, Saudi Arabia’s permanent representative to the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, “Women are underrepresented in the fields of artificial intelligence and technology”.
“At the moment, when digital technologies are reshaping everyday life, we cannot deny that women are underrepresented in AI and STEM fields in general. Women only represent 3 percent of Nobel prize laureates in science and only 12 percent of artificial Intelligence researchers globally,” Princess Al-Muqrin remarked.
The Princess insisted that women’s participation and viewpoints are required in the technology sector in order to make it work for everyone and said that this inequality is depriving the world of huge untapped abilities.
