AI Index Report 2021 Chapter 6

This chapter presents diversity statistics within the AI workforce and academia. It draws on collaborations with various organizations—in particular, Women in Machine Learning (WiML), Black in AI (BAI), and Queer in AI (QAI)— each of which aims to improve diversity in some dimension in the field. The data is neither comprehensive nor conclusive. In preparing this chapter, the AI Index team encountered significant challenges as a result of the sparsity of publicly available demographic data. The lack of publicly available demographic data limits the degree to which statistical analyses can assess the impact of the lack of diversity in the AI workforce on society as well as broader technology development. The diversity issue in AI is well known, and making more data available from both academia and industry is essential to measuring the scale of the problem and addressing it.