This Clayman Conversations event will examine the complex intersections of gender and AI, exploring both the risks and possibilities of this powerful technology. Artificial intelligence is rapidly reshaping how we work and communicate. At the same time, it is also reshaping intimacy, care, creativity, and human relationships. How do existing gender norms, stereotypes, and inequalities become encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems? How might AI deepen inequities -- or offer new methods and tools for feminist and just futures?
An interdisciplinary panel will investigate how gender both shapes and is shaped by AI Speakers will discuss how AI “learns” gender and replicates gender biases and norms, as well as the implications. The conversation will also explore alternative approaches for gender-equitable and transformative technologies, moving toward feminist AI futures.
Register here for this online event
Speakers Include:
Angèle Christin is an associate professor of communication (and, by courtesy, sociology), Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Fellow, and HAI senior fellow at Stanford University, and a former faculty fellow at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Her research examines the social and cultural impact of digital technologies and AI through qualitative studies of professional sites transformed by digitization, computation, and automation, with a longstanding interest in AI ethics — including how ethical, accountable, and safe AI discourse emerged in Silicon Valley and the contradictions shaping "ethics entrepreneurs" in tech.
Her forthcoming book, Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media (University of Chicago Press, Fall 2026), examines how platforms, brands, and audiences reproduce precarity and inequality in social media careers. Her award-winning book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020), analyzed how journalists in U.S. and French newsrooms made sense of traffic numbers in distinct ways, shaping the news differently across the two countries. Her research spans additional sites including U.S. and French criminal courts, the ethics of predictive algorithms, and most recently, how astrophysicists and astronomers use AI for scientific discovery. At Stanford, she leads the Technology, Culture, and Power Speaker Series. She serves as co-editor of the Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology at Princeton University Press.
Catherine D’Ignazio is a hacker mama, scholar, and artist/designer who focuses on feminist technology, data justice, and civic engagement. She has run women’s health hackathons, designed global news recommendation systems, created talking and tweeting water quality sculptures, and led walking data visualizations to envision the future of sea-level rise. Her 2020 book from MIT Press, Data Feminism, co-authored with Lauren Klein, charts a course for more ethical and empowering data science practices. Her second book, Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action (MIT Press, 2024) is an extended case study about grassroots data activism to end gender-related violence. D’Ignazio is an associate professor of urban science and planning at MIT, where she is the director of the Data + Feminism Lab, which uses data and computational methods to work toward gender and racial equity.
Her research at the intersection of technology, design & social justice has been published in Big Data & Society, the Journal of Community Informatics, and the proceedings of ACM SIGCHI and ACM FAccT. Her art and design projects have won awards from the Tanne Foundation, Turbulence.org, and the Knight Foundation and have been exhibited at the Venice Bienniale and the ICA Boston.
Safiya U. Noble is the David O. Sears Presidential Endowed Chair of Social Sciences and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). She is the director of the Center on Resilience & Digital Justice and co-director of the Minderoo Initiative on Tech & Power at UCLA. She currently serves as a director of the UCLA DataX Initiative, leading work in critical data studies for the campus.
Noble is the author of the best-selling book on algorithmic harm in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely reviewed in scholarly and popular publications. In 2021, she was recognized as a MacArthur Foundation Fellow for her groundbreaking work on algorithmic discrimination.
Noble is a board member of the Cyber Civil Rights Initiative, serving those vulnerable to online harassment, and provides expertise to a number of civil and human rights organizations. She is a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, where she is a chartering member of the International Panel on the Information Environment. In 2022, she was recognized as the inaugural NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award recipient.
Moderated by Genevieve Smith, Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow
Smith completed her doctoral degree at the University of Oxford in September 2025, where she studied gender impacts of artificial intelligence in low- and middle-income countries. Smith founded the Responsible AI Initiative at the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Lab and teaches at U.C. Berkeley on responsible AI She is a research affiliate at the Minderoo Centre for Technology & Democracy at Cambridge University and at the Technology & Management Centre for Development at University of Oxford. Smith was recently the Responsible AI Fellow at the United States Agency for International Development. Prior to her doctoral work, Smith spent over a decade researching and working on topics of economic empowerment and inclusive technology with U.N. Women, the U.N. Foundation, and the International Center for Research on Women. She is driven by a commitment to critically examine impacts of AI on society, particularly related to gender, and explore alternative, equitable tech futures.