Adrienne Gorra-Heinrich, head of Aboitiz Data Innovation’s (ADI) AI Center of Excellence (CoE) in the Philippines, is at the forefront of a groundbreaking research initiative aimed at harnessing Artificial Intelligence (AI) to combat gender discrimination in banking services. Her team’s research, addressing gender disparities within the banking sector, has garnered recognition in the 2022 Global Top 100 AI Project List, curated by the International Research Centre on Artificial Intelligence under UNESCO.
The research project, a collaboration between Union Bank Philippines, Aboitiz Data Innovation, and Queen’s University in Canada, explored whether excluding gender information when evaluating creditworthiness had a positive impact on those being protected. Contrary to expectations, the study challenged the notion that withholding an applicant’s gender from banking services reduced discrimination. Instead, the findings showed that “blind data” did not necessarily lead to fairness, and in some cases, it exacerbated gender bias.
Gorra-Heinrich emphasizes the importance of responsible inclusion of sensitive data to prevent discrimination against women and minority groups. She noted that while gender bias in accessing banking services is less pronounced in the Philippines, an imbalance still exists, with men often receiving preferential treatment over women when it comes to financial services like loans.
In addition to its recognition in the Philippines, Gorra-Heinrich’s team’s efforts to reduce gender discrimination in finance have also been acknowledged in Canada. A co-authored paper received the Best Paper Award at the 2023 Manufacturing Service Operations Management Special Interest Group (MSOM SIG) sponsored by McGill University in Montreal, focusing on addressing gender discrimination in financial lending decisions through responsible AI.
Another paper from her team, titled “Removing Demographic Data Can Make AI Discrimination Worse,” has been recently published in the Harvard Business Review.
Beyond her pioneering research, Gorra-Heinrich’s team is actively engaged in a project focused on voice technology, encompassing speech recognition and conversational AI, to streamline banking services. The utilization of voice technology aims to eliminate manual data entry in banking apps, making interactions with users more natural and efficient. This technology will enhance accessibility and security, transforming users’ voices into their passwords, while accommodating the diverse languages and dialects spoken in the Philippines.
