In a series of posts we present the GEinCEE CoP members’ rationale for joining our Community and their current developments in gender equality. Read a post written by Anna Knapińska from National Information Processing Institute.
Attending #ACTon Gender, as well as being a part of the Gender Equality in Central and Eastern Europe group under the project is a big opportunity for my organization. The National Information Processing Institute is a key entity in collecting, processing and analysing data on science and higher education system in Poland. We employ very different people – researchers, information & technology specialists, data scientists etc., realizing that the ICT environment is gender imbalanced in favour of men, and that entails with the specific work culture.
In line with countless research, excluding women from this area may pose a serious hazard for society. If women don’t participate in developing artificial intelligence applications, biased algorithms are designed. That’s a huge problem, for instance when we use such applications in hiring, evaluating performance and other human resources processes. It might bring real detrimental effects.
My institute would like to create a workplace, where everyone feels comfortable and can use the most valuable skills to the improvement of emerging research and technologies. We are going to set trends in equal recruiting and treating employees in terms of gender, but also age, nationality, disability, sexual orientation, beliefs and so on. We hope that sharing experiences through GEinCEE meetings and workshops will allow us to reach these goals.
For the time being, I have been talking with our directors about the further steps which should be done in the project, as well as collecting the useful data at the different levels of my organization. Implementing the institutional equality plan should be the final step in our journey. I hope in the foreseeable future we can be regarded as both an ICT research leader and gender equality leader.