ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Swap a woman's name for a man's on the same profile, and the visibility climbs. Amazon's hiring algorithm learned to filter out the word "women's" without anyone telling it to. None of this is a fault in an otherwise fair system. It is the system, running on exactly what it was trained on.
This week Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE are joined by Cecilia Jastrzembska, a senior policy advisor and one of the clearest voices on algorithmic accountability in the UK. Cecilia has campaigned to make misogyny a hate crime and works where political journalism, public policy and advocacy meet. Her argument runs against the comfortable version of this conversation: bias in AI is structural, not a series of unlucky accidents, and designing for accountability has become a strategic necessity rather than a moral footnote. We get into the recruitment tools quietly deciding who gets hired, the LinkedIn experiment that exposed how visibility shifts with gender, and why so many government consultations fail the people they are meant to serve. Underneath all of it sits one idea: legibility. Making these systems readable enough that the people they fail can challenge them.
AI for Equity is hosted by Leah Garrett and Jenny Garrett OBE, exploring how technology deepens inequality and how it can be built to do the opposite.
Cecilia Jastrzembska is a UK Government Senior Policy Advisor at Director Level. She founded European Movement Women and is a Co-Founding member of of Women In AI, UKAI, an Advocate for 50:50 Parliament, and nominee for the Outstanding Award for Tech Regulation by CogX as well as the UN Women UK Campaigner of the Year Award. A longstanding gender equality campaigner, Cecilia is an award winning global speaker and political journalist (LinkTree) published in over 25 international newspapers. Through these positions as well as central government, she has worked with, spoken alongside, organised and chaired panel events and roundtables with over 200 MPs, MEPs, diplomats, NGO representatives and international legal experts on ending (M)VAWG, mitigating the climate crisis and ethical AI.
