100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics list — 2024

Every year when we publish the “100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics” list, we receive many questions about how the list was selected. The detailed selection criteria and process is on our website but our goal is simple: Elevate lesser-known diverse experts and hidden figures in this critical space.

We have removed many barriers that historically prevented experts from underrepresented communities from being recognized for their contributions to the tech industry. We try not to nominate the same person twice so that we can recognize 100 new voices every year. We encourage self-nominations. We don’t ask nominees to fill out a long complicated form. We don’t ask for references. We don’t charge an application fee. We don’t conflate achievements with visibility. We don’t consider a nominee’s influencer clout or follower counts. More importantly, we do not skew the selection in favor of high-profile AI celebrities.

We showcase experts from a broad range of backgrounds, who are doing important work in this critical space but lack the recognition they deserve. The list reflects our multi-disciplinary approach to diversity as the nominees represent a wide range of backgrounds including but not limited to STEM such as communications, law, policy, and human rights. We strive for regional and geographic diversity to reduce the expertise divide between global south and north. Non-western countries accounted for nearly 40% of the list this year, with Africa at 13%. Nominees who self-identified as Women of Color or Black accounted for almost 45% of the list and women over 40yrs represent 22% of the list.

Making the process easy for the nominees also means our amazing selection committee has to do much of the heavy lifting in researching the nominees and using language translators to review their work to avoid English-language bias. This year was especially a daunting task because we had to sift through a shortlist from 600 entries in our directory. Many thanks to the selection committee members for the 2024 list.

Ebitie Amughan https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebitieamughan/
Amy Chou https://www.linkedin.com/in/amchou/
Teemu Roos https://www.linkedin.com/in/teemu-roos/
Chhavi Chauhan https://www.linkedin.com/in/chhavichauhan/
Hessie Jones https://www.linkedin.com/in/hessiejones1/

Special shout out to Dylan Baker from DAIR for sharing additional names for us to consider. Also, many thanks to amazing folks who took on this hugely important and hard task on in the past years — Temi Lasade-Anderson, Sinit Zeru, Debra Ruh, and Alaric Aloor (in memoriam).