How This Founder Partnered With Google and Unicef to Bring
More Women Into Tech. Bringing more women into AI roles could add $200 billion to the global economy. Here's how to recruit and retain female talent.
By Jennifer Conrad, Senior writer
When Tara Chklovski moved to the U.S. from India to pursue an advanced degree in aerospace engineering, she was shocked to see how few women were pursuing STEM degrees.
"I was just very, very surprised that a developed country like the U.S. had such few women in the actual innovation and tech engineering space," she says, recalling her days as the only woman on a research team working on drone development.
Chklovski felt uncomfortable working on warfighting machines anyway, so in 2006, she left her PhD program and founded the nonprofit Technovation, whose mission is to encourage more women to pursue STEM degrees and become tech leaders and innovators. Right now, less than a third of global tech workers are women, according to a report released Thursday by The AI Forward Alliance (Taifa), a group that includes Technovation, Unicef, Google, Shopify, and others. With the right initiatives in place, that number could double by 2038.
Technovation's signature program, Technovation Girls, has worked with more than 150,000 young women ages 8 to 18 to find ways to use technology to solve problems in their communities. The goal, Chklovski says, is to "bring the most powerful, cutting-edge tools to the most vulnerable groups so that they could solve their own problems." Projects have included using generative AI to create audio guides for the blind and creating a database of Vietnamese facial expressions to make machine vision systems more effective on that population.
Many alumnae go on to pursue STEM degrees and some even launch their own startups -- but as Chklovski and others note, there's still a lot more work to do. The Taifa report, for which Chklovski was the lead author, concludes that training women and girls for AI jobs could add about $212 billion to the global economy in the same time period, which would represent an estimated return on investment of about 560 times the cost of training.
Women who train in AI and tech jobs could see their salaries increase four to six times, but more affluent countries tend to have fewer women entering the tech field, the report notes. Here are Chklovski top three lessons for recruiting and retaining female tech talent, based on nearly two decades of research and experience.
The right support matters
Young women are more likely to pursue roles in tech if they see people like them in those positions -- but they need sustained support to keep their interest. That's why Technovation emphasizes mentorship, including bringing in women from big tech firms and alumni of the program to work with current participants.
Research shows keeping young women engaged "requires just going beyond the technology and the coding, and making sure there's a very strong, supportive community of mentors, role models, and parents," says Chklovski. In fact, many women who go through Technovation's program have such a positive experience that they return as mentors.
Tech doesn't have to be intimidating
In a survey conducted by Technovation, more than 30 percent of young women said they didn't believe that they were capable of solving big problems in their communities. Having girls work on projects that align with their interests and passions helps show them that they can make a difference and that they can take on new things -- something that anyone at any age can learn from, Chklovski says.
"Getting your hands dirty and building something is powerful because, No. 1, you put it on your résumé, and No. 2, you just built your own confidence, because you built something technical that solves a problem," Chklovski says. "Make it a habit to learn something that makes you uncomfortable. Build that muscle of learning." She adds that if artificial intelligence intimidates you, start by spending 30 minutes a day watching entrepreneur and Stanford professor Andrew Ng's machine learning lectures, which are available for free on YouTube.
Big events can solidify a passion for the field
Technovation ends its program with a high-energy gathering similar to a sporting event, as big events help solidify the community and build a sense of belonging in the industry, according to Chklovski. Most of the girls who take part in Technovation's program don't have a tech background; they're convinced by parents or other adults that the program will be fun or encouraged to do it with their friends.
"When you build something that didn't exist and the community recognizes that, that's an unforgettable experience," says Chklovski.
Photo: Courtesy Tara Chklovski.