In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky, then a PhD student at University of Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton, won the annual ‘ImageNet’ image labelling competition by an impressive 10.8 per cent margin. His use of a neural network-based object classification algorithm would then trigger a major shift the way computers would relate to images and the physical world more generally. ImageNet is an image database first published by computer scientist Fei-Fei Li in 2009 and labelled primarily by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Its intention was to ‘map out the entire world of objects’ for the sake of training machine learning systems. The first winner of the ImageNet competition in 2010 achieved a labelling accuracy of 71.8 per cent.

Graduation trends in the last twenty-five years show that majors in computing-related fields have had low popularity among female students in the United States and Europe. For instance, in 2015, US women earned a mere 18% (9,209) of bachelor’s degrees in computer science (CS), which is less than the number earned in 1985 (14,431) (National Science Board, 2018). Similarly, in Europe women represented 16.7% of total graduates in information communication technology (ICT) in 2016 (European Commission, 2018). Low participation of women in computing education has been a pressing problem in Western countries. Gender diversity in computing is imperative as it will increase the skilled labor force pool, enrich innovation, and foster social justice. Most importantly, there is a high demand for people with computing skills. The number of ICT specialists in the European Union grew by 36.1% from 2007 to 2017, more than ten times as high as the increase (3.2%) for total employment (Eurostat, 2018). Employment in computing-related occupations in the United States is projected to grow 13% from 2016 to 2026, which is faster than the average for all occupations. This is expected to add about 557,100 new jobs (US Department of Labor, 2017). Often such growing needs are met by foreign skilled workers, mostly from Asian countries. It is, therefore, no surprise that a number of governmental and corporate initiatives exist in the United States and in Europe to empower students with the computing skills to thrive in a global economy.

Diverse perspectives coming from a diversity of people in the information technology (IT) profession yields benefits both in terms of products and services provided to consumers and in terms of employment opportunities presented to those who would work in this field (Trauth et al., 2006a). In this regard the gender imbalance presents an important challenge to researchers, teachers, and employers. Overcoming the barriers to greater diversity in the field also requires an understanding of the context in which they occur and can be addressed.

Our behaviour in informational environments is governed by new mechanisms of control. Technological environments do not simply enable or constrain specific behaviours, but are instead instrumented so that rational choices of agents are directed towards pre-specified goals. This type of engagement with the informational world is under-theorised in law. This chapter argues that we need to transcend the separation between physical and informational and work on building appropriate techno-legal mechanisms. It suggests we can think about these emerging environments, and the legalities that are implemented into them, as emerging jurisdictions that do not undermine law, but rather give it another form of expression.

In 1882 renowned English scientist Charles Darwin announced that “[t]he chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shewn by man’s attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he takes up, than can woman” (Darwin, 1871, p. 564). This belief in women’s inferior intellect was not new, but as an eminent scientist, Darwin’s proclamations held great sway in his time and place – and since – although nowadays few would admit to this. Or would they? Jump forward to 1992 and we see the arrival of John Gray’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, which became a phenomenal best-seller (selling more than fifteen million copies globally), and continues to be so. While the book is not as forthright in saying women’s intellect is inferior, it does explain the many ways in which men and women differ – including the ways they think (Gray, 1992).

Automated decision-making and profiling are becoming more prolific and changing in nature. What began with police photography and Habitual Criminal Registers has reached a new crescendo with computer vision and data science. Law has struggled to adequately regulate these technologies and practices. Where it has been successful, law constrains profiling by protecting ‘identity’. However, in the contemporary technological environment, the notions of identity that animate the legal thinking and the notions of identity that animate the data science and profiling are markedly different. This chapter introduces the argument that these contradictory ways of thinking about people is why the law has struggled to introduce meaningful regulation in this field. It introduces the metaphor of the ‘world state’, the process by which the world and the people within it are translated into the computational world, and asks what law needs to do as the world state becomes more prominent.

Dr. Black is perhaps most well known for initiating – and succeeding – in “saving Bletchley Park” (which is also the title of her book). Bletchley Park was a top-secret center for the famous World War II code breakers, including many women, whose work was credited with shortening the war by two to four years. The center deteriorated rapidly after the war and would most probably have been dismantled if not for the fundraising efforts of Dr. Black and her supporters. Bletchley Park is now a thriving visitors’ center and is co-housed with the UK National Museum of Computing. Dr. Black’s initial involvement with Bletchley Park inspired her to conduct an oral history project to capture the memories of the women who worked there. She met several of the surviving women code breakers; some shared their stories with her, others never revealed the details of their highly secret work.

Since 2006–2007, I have interviewed numerous women in technology careers to understand their motivation for choosing their careers and their experiences in the technical workforce. While the intent of an initial study that emerged from some of these interviews (Adya, 2008) was to compare and contrast the experiences of South Asian and American women in the US workforce, the stories of some of these women were more broadly impactful. Some of these women were inspiring in how they overcame barriers and eventually succeeded in information technology (IT) careers, and others in how they changed the course of their lives, sometimes away from IT careers and into others that they felt they could grow into.

Previous research has revealed surprising cross-national differences in the gender composition of information and communication technology (ICT) fields. In 2001, for example, women’s representation in ICT degree programs was weakest in the world’s most affluent and reputably gender-progressive societies (Charles and Bradley, 2006). Historical trends in the ICT sectors of affluent democracies seem, moreover, to have gone in the direction of more, not less, gender segregation. Despite dramatic increases in female labor force participation and university attendance, US women’s share of bachelor’s degrees in computer science decreased from 28% to 18% between 2000 and 2015 (NSF, 2018, appendix 2-21), with similar declines documented in Europe for the 1990s (Schinzel, 2002).

Prior to the 2010 World Classical Tamil Conference in Coimbatore, a music video called “Semmozhiyaan Tamil Mozhiyaan” made its way to television networks across Tamil Nadu. The video was shot by Gautham Menon and had music composed by A. R. Rehman – both leading figures in the Tamil film industry at the time, with lyrics penned by the then chief minister and Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) headman Muthuvl Karunanidhi. The song was intended as an anthem for the conference, but soon started being referred to as the state anthem.

In 2015 the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) published the latest edition of its Science Report. Published every five years, the Science Report maps the status of science, technology, and innovation and governance around the world. The 2015 edition was conceived as a response to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the 2030 Agenda, which recognizes the role of science, technology, and innovation as an important contributor to global sustainability. This edition also included the first globally comprehensive presentation and analysis of global data on women’s representation in science and technology outside Europe and North America. This chapter contains an overview of the main findings of the 2015 UNESCO Science Report chapter “Is the Gender Gap Narrowing in Science and Engineering?,” as well as recent analysis of the factors encouraging and constraining women’s participation in STEM fields globally.