Opening Doors for Women to be on the Frontlines of the AI Revolution

This article appeared in Working Nation on Wednesday, September 11, 2024.

Despite efforts by the tech industry to diversify and include more women among its ranks, closing that gender gap has a long way to go. Women make up 57.5% of the U.S. workforce, but only 35% of the tech jobs.

With massive growth in AI and the job opportunities linked to it, it’s a career pathway that can land you a good-paying job. Right now, the average annual salary for an AI technician nationwide is around $74,000 a year, with some positions paying as much as $177,000, according to ZipRecruiter.

As in all tech jobs, women remain an untapped source of talent. One organization has a unique approach to change that.

Break Through Tech AI is a program aimed at opening doors to artificial intelligence-related careers for undergraduate female students who are underserved, including Black, Latino, Indigenous students, and those from low-income backgrounds as well as non-binary students. It’s part of Break Through Tech (BTT), an initiative of Cornell Tech.

Building Bridges to AI Career Path

“Break Through Tech is on a mission to change the path to power and influence in a tech-enabled world,” says Judith Spitz PhD, founder and executive director of Break Through Tech. “Put simply, we imagine a future in which women are fairly represented in every room where technology and, in particular, AI decisions are being made.”

Spitz knows firsthand what it’s like to be the only woman in the room where tech decisions are made. She had a 30-year tech career at Verizon, starting her work in an AI-applied research lab and rising through the ranks to become a chief information officer at the company.

“By the time I was in the last few years of my career, I really was scratching my head around why am I still almost always the only woman in the room and looking down into the pipeline of talent in the organization, not that many women coming up behind me?,” explains Spitz.

When she entered the workforce in the 1980s, 37% of women pursued bachelor’s degrees in computer science, but that number fell below 20% within 20 years. Spitz was determined to change that and build a bridge between academia and industry.

She launched Break Through Tech in 2016 to support and courage women to get an education in computer science and pursue careers in tech fields. In 2021, she added Break Through Tech AI and touts it as the largest program of its kind in the country right now.

To date, she says 750 students have completed the program that is offered virtually and 1,000 students are enrolled in the current cohort.

Opening Doors to AI

Break Through Tech AI is a one-year voluntary program that does not offer credits. In order to be eligible, students need to be pursuing an undergraduate degree in a tech or quant-related major. Students in the program typically attend schools outside the top 20 colleges and universities, the same institutions that are home to academics with the latest and best AI tools.

“We democratize access to those academic resources by collaborating with faculty and Ph. D. students at places like Cornell and MIT and UCLA. We have them teach a summer course in machine learning, industry tools, but not to their students, to our students,” explains Spitz.

She adds: “It’s just accepting the reality that there’s a whole wealth of students out there that even though they want to learn these skills, they don’t have access to the people who know them,”

Along with the academic component, Spitz explains that students are matched with industry professionals and work on actual projects in order to build portfolio assets. Professional readiness training is also offered in which students are paired with mentors to learn about things such as interviewing and leveraging Linkedin profiles.

The ultimate goal is to put students on paths to careers in AI starting with jobs that don’t require a master’s degree or higher, such as data science engineers, machine learning engineers, and AI engineers, roles that can pay six figures.

To get on that pathway, the program’s goal is for students to land paid summer internships.

Bringing Talent to Employers

To do that, Spitz explains the organization is also bringing talent to employers’ doorsteps during academic breaks in January and May that give the students an immersive real-world project experience.

“We have designed a very innovative micro-internship program called “Sprinternships,” which brings students to companies for a three-week paid micro internship which allows them to meet these students before they’re sure that they want to offer them a full summer internship,” explains Spitz.

She adds, “We’re finding, we’re vetting, we’re preparing the students. And then we’re bringing them to these companies in ways that they can engage and discover that these students really do have potential. So it is a win-win,” she stresses.

“Student gets a resume credential and some experience that they can talk about on an interview, and the confidence that allows them to get their foot in the door, and then earn their way to that offer.”

(Photo: Break Through Tech)

Seeking Diverse Perspectives

Spitz says 80% of students land summer internships and counts 300 business partners to date that include companies big and small. Verizon is one of them.

”The BTT AI program is part of Verizon’s efforts to attract talent along multiple layers of diversity that go beyond gender, race, and ethnicity and extend to socioeconomic and geographical diversity, too,” says Meghna Sinha, vice president of the AI Center at Verizon in a written response to WorkingNation’s questions.

She adds, “It gives us access to a talent pipeline that is difficult to reach otherwise, given BTT’s wide reach beyond the top universities and top cities. BTT partners with 200+ universities, and through our relationship we have already worked with more than 50 students on summer projects as a part of their AI Studio program.”

Real World Experience

It’s those kinds of real world experiences that prompted 21-year-old Marie-Therese Wellington to rethink her future and aim for a career in AI. Wellington, an immigrant from Trinidad, is a recent graduate of the Break Through Tech AI program and is heading into her senior year at the New York Institute of Technology.

She says she didn’t know much about AI before the program, but says she learned the foundations of machine learning along with programming languages that included Python that she put to use for projects like the one she worked on at the New York Botanical Gardens. “We had to create an image classification model to separate different specimen types from their repository, which is over 81,000 images,” explains Wellington.

She admits the work can be challenging. “It does seem frustrating at times. And it does make you feel like you’re just running, you’re just chasing a tail, but it is so rewarding at the end.

“When you’ve learned all of these skills and you’ve done all the research and read all the papers and learned about this methodology to help you. I just gained the confidence and a level of respect for myself and my work and my work ethic that I don’t know if I would have really gained if I hadn’t gone through this process,” adds Wellington.

Among some of the most valuable skills she learned outside of AI, she says: time management, communication, and teamwork.

After completing the Break Through Tech AI program, Wellington worked at a paid summer internship at a bank doing database management. She has now adjusted her math major to include a specification in scientific computation and is hoping to pursue a career in AI after she graduates next year.

“My ultimate goal, I think, would be to do something with machine learning and AI that either maximizes efficiency or does some type of greater good to help other people,” says Wellington who would especially like to focus her efforts on education and learning explaining that she herself struggled in school.

It’s these kinds of different perspectives that Verizon’s Sinha stresses will be crucial in shaping the future of AI. She writes: “It’s not just about women being in AI and technology leadership roles; it’s about ensuring that emerging AI products reflect the diverse perspectives of women and minorities at all levels.”