Power Imbalances in Society and AI: On the Need to Expand the Feminist Approach

Eva Johanna Gengler (), Marco Wedel (), Alexandra Wudel () and Sven Laumer ()
Additional contact information
Eva Johanna Gengler: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg
Marco Wedel: TU Berlin, Chair for Work, Technology and Participation
Alexandra Wudel: FemAI—Center for Feminist Artificial Intelligence GmbH
Sven Laumer: FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg

A chapter in Conceptualizing Digital Responsibility for the Information Age, 2025, pp 89-97 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Recent advances in artificial intelligence have brought novel opportunities for businesses, societies, and individuals alike, yet they also raise complex questions on inequitable power distribution. We see contemporary AI systems, that reinforce power imbalances and disadvantage marginalized, underrepresented, and underprivileged people. Current approaches to advancing AI, such as ethical, fair, or trustworthy AI, have not included the effects of power in their considerations. As feminism has a long history of doing so, we introduce an intersectional and inclusive feminist approach to shape AI in a more equitable way. We approach this by building on recent information systems and interdisciplinary research as well as on evidence from expert interviews in focus groups, which we conducted in 2022 and 2023. Our study reveals that utilizing a feminist approach could be effective firstly, to shape AI systems and secondly, to change prevailing power structures in societal systems to become more equitable.

Keywords: Artificial intelligence; Power imbalances; Feminist philosophy of technology; Socio-technical-systems; Beyond AI ethics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:lnichp:978-3-031-80119-8_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/9783031801198

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-80119-8_6

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Lecture Notes in Information Systems and Organization from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().