Melinda Gates: With so few women in AI, we are baking bias into the system

Dallas(CNN Business) While Silicon Valley has made some strides in creating opportunities and more inclusive workplaces for women, Melinda Gates believes there's still work to be done.

"If you talk with women and men in Silicon Valley, some companies have changed, but quite a few still haven't," the co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation tells CNN's Poppy Harlow during a Boss Files interview. "And, what I know to be true is that we need more pathways for women into technology."

Having a bad reputation for supporting women in the workplace can be costly for a company.

"Now what I'm seeing is that when women graduate college, they'll have about four or five job offers from the tech companies, and I am hearing young women say, 'I don't want to go to those three tech companies because they are abrasive. I want to go to the ones that are supportive of women and more collaborative," she said.

Gates knows what it's like to be the only female in a room.

While she was at Duke University, there were very few women studying computer science. "I got used to coding with teams of guys. I got used to even running coding teams of guys at college."

So when she started at Microsoft (MSFT), it wasn't unusual that she was surrounded by men. Her job was exciting and challenging, but something still didn't feel quite right.

"It wasn't the work or the opportunities; they were awesome," Gates writes in her recently released book "The Moment of Lift." "It was the culture. It was just so brash, so argumentative and competitive, with people fighting to the end on every point they were making and every piece of data they were debating."

So she started to think about her options.

"I thought about quitting after two years. I thought strongly about quitting," Gates said.

That's when she decided to take a different approach to how she worked. "I thought, 'Well, I'll just give it a try. I'll try and be myself for a first.' I didn't think it would work."

But it did.

She created a more collaborative environment and stood up for her team if deadlines were missed or projects went off track. Employees took note, and she attracted talent from across the company. Before she left Microsoft, she was running a division with 1,700 workers.

A dangerous lack of diversity in AI

The lack of adequate representation of women and minorities in the workplace -- and especially in the tech industry -- can have lasting effects.

In the world of artificial intelligence, an industry that plays an increasingly influential role in our buying, hiring and other key decisions, Gates noted that the number of women is "so small it's unbelievable."

"We are baking bias into the system by not having women have a seat at the table and not having people of color at the table," Gates said.

History is a good lesson.

"I know what happened when the Constitution was written in this country and how long it took women to get the right to vote. And look where we are on race issues in this country," she told Harlow. "Do we really want to bake bias into artificial intelligence?"

And we've already seen the lack of diversity in AI play out.

Gates pointed out that looking up the term "grandfather" in the early days of search engines would result in pages and pages of white men.

"I've met a lot of Asian grandfathers, a lot of Hispanic grandfathers, a lot of black grandfathers," she said. "I call it the 'white guy in the hoodie who's in his twenties figuring out the search engine' -- and he's a white guy, he probably thinks of a white grandfather."

How to close the gap

Gates believes transparency from companies is helping to bring change to the workplace.

Public pressure for companies to disclose information, like the number of women and minorities in leadership positions, has helped. And now, Gates said there is "huge pressure on companies to hire more technical women."

Still, she believes more needs to be done.

More inclusive workplace cultures and policies like paid parental leave are also needed to attract and keep women.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation used to offer 52 weeks of paid leave to its employees, but recently changed its policy. In January, the foundation announced new parents would get six months of paid leave and a $20,000 taxable stipend to help with child care costs and other family needs. While a reduction, the benefit is still generous compared to the parental leave policies of most US employers.

The United States is the only developed nation that doesn't mandate paid leave for new mothers. "If we value family in society, why are we not willing to shave off a tiny percentage of our GDP and put it into a policy that's sensible?" Gates asked.