Notes

It's a pleasure and honour to be here. When I was invited to talk about the challenges that women in stem face, I thought I would touch on a couple of issues: the pipeline problem, encouraging gir!s at an early age to be excited about technology, rob otics, sciences, ai. I thought it would be a good idea to share just how much we've done for the past 2 years at women in ai. Running summer schools for girls. Masterclass for the ethics of artificial intelligence.

And these are all laudable achievements. But I am not here to skim The surface. I am here to talk about root cause. About things that are hard to come to terms with. Although we must do.

If we want to cure the problem instead of grappling with the symptoms of

And the problem is prejudice.

When Einstein said that a prejudice is harder to crack than an atom, he was right on so many levels. Cracking an atom, in scientific terms,is nuclear fisskon.

In this talk I will be cracking a few prejudices and I hope that the energy you will feel, comfortable or uncomfortable, will motivate you to fix the root cause, instead of grapp!ing with its symptoms.

Although human civilisation has achieved so much, our modern society is built on a history of system exclusion.

It's hard to say when it all stareted , but we do have consensus that the early pre and post Socratic communities lead the way to modern scientific inquiry.

Pythagoras and his disciples have up their mundane lifestyle and retreated into the forest dedicate their lives to the study of numbers. They held onto two strong beliefs: that numbers are a way to understand the divine and that only a rational mathematical mind was able to master the science of numbers.

These two beliefs were reborn and readily accepted 1000 years later. Charlemange's ambition was to reform the church. He reinforced that only boys could join the c!ergh, despite evidence that several nuneries were successfully managed by well educated nuns.
He also made sure that only the clergy had access to education , specifically to the study of latin, maths and astronomy. Men in the clergy were not allowed to mafry, as contact with Women was considered impure and unholy.

For centuries to come science was the handmade of theology. Scientific thought was only accepted if it proved that God was the first measurer and that he only worked with perfect shapes and forms.

Scientists like Copernicus Galileo and kel!we proved that religious perfection had nothing to do with the laws of physics