# Building a Territorial Working Group to Reduce Gender Gap in the Field of Artificial Intelligence
## 1 Introduction  
Jobs in the area of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) constitute a large proportion of the available professions nowadays. Among them, those related to Computer Science and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are highly demanded in Europe and worldwide. As it is said in the 2018 report of the European Center of Development for vocational training [1] entitled, Skills forecast: trends and challenges to 2030, the demand for ICT professionals is expected to increase 12.8% by 2030. The US census bureau published Figure 1, where we can see that women are nearly half of the workforce, but only 27% are working in STEM. We can observe that, since 2000, the number of women employed in Engineering is quite stable at around 10%, but Computer Science is the only field showing a decreasing trend, with only about 20% of women in this area in 2019 [2]. Social sciences, mathematics, physics, and life sciences have a percentage of women above 40% and below 60%, showing a good balance between genders. The numbers shown for computer workers are alarming, considering that we are working towards a digital society in the near future where many jobs will be in the STEM fields and women should be there together with men. In the region of study of this paper, Catalonia (Spain), the Catalan Talent Observatory regularly publishes job demands. Figure 2 shows the five most demanded occupancy profiles in 2021; computer programming and consultancy being the largest with 67% of the share, followed by the other three ICT-related jobs and total 78% of the job offers in Catalonia. The presence of women in ICT educational courses and jobs is known to be smaller than men. Traditionally, those professions have been associated with males, leading to gender inequality in the digital area. The European Commission in its 2018 report [3] highlights this bias, observing that there are four times more men taking ICT-related courses than women. The same report also detects that there are 313% more men than women working in digital professions. These differences lead to the problem of leaving  
Figure 1: Employment of women in the US from 1970 to 2019. Figure 2: Occupational demand in Catalonia in the last 12 months (published December 2021), from The Catalan Talent Observatory (aqu.cat). women out of some of the most relevant professions in the near future, such as the ones related to Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. Since the presence of women in STEM and AI is too low in the professional sector, it is difficult to claim there are balanced panels in round tables, professional teams, or women in directive positions in the field. Thus, in the particular case of Informatics or AI, a previous challenge is now a priority: to inspire girls to choose a degree in the field so they can get the proper training to become professionals. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a discipline highly connected with Computer Science as it emerged from the idea of building intelligent software running in a standard computer or embedded in a robot. Therefore, AI methods are studied in bachelor's degrees in Informatics although recently some universities have started to offer specific AI degrees. The field of AI devoted to data mining or data science is also strongly connected with degrees in Mathematics and Statistics. AI-focused masters and doctorates also permit students to specialize in this field. These courses are given in Engineering and Polytechnic universities. The majority of students in these branches are male, which raises an alarm about the low influence that women will have in AI and, consequently, in the design of the near-future technology. Figure 3 shows the gender distribution progression in Spain in the last five years, taking three university years (2016-2017, 2018-2019, and 2020-2021) [4]. The percentage of women is increasing slightly in Engineering and Informatics, but has decreased a bit in Mathematics and Statistics (also related to ICT jobs).