NSF Grant Award, “The future of work: Assessing the profession of ethical technology for the future of tech work”

Deb Donig, California Polytechnic State University, ddonig@calpoly.edu
Matthew Harsh, California Polytechnic State University, mharsh@calpoly.edu

Background: Despite attempts to mitigate exclusionary tendencies in the tech sphere, persistent concerns about the ethics and equity still remain. Issues such as sexism, racism, classicism, and geographical bias in workplaces, and vast imbalances in the equity of tech, including algorithmic bias and evaporating privacy have together led to a current alarm about the consequences of big tech’s practices and products. Out of this “techlash,” emerges a demand and vision for a new kind of technologist. Major tech companies have created thousands of jobs across the US with titles such as “ethical hacker” or “ethics officer.” These jobs will constitute one of the most important and quickly growing job fields. However, there is no data or existing understanding about what skills, training, and knowledge these new ‘ethical technologists’ need to perform these roles, or how best to equip them with a background that will allow them to succeed in these roles.

Objectives: This project seeks to understand the scope and the character of ethical technology as an emerging profession, and to address the future of ethical technology work. Such an understanding will increase the efficacy of workers in these roles, and additionally influence the way that universities train their students for this new profession. Through this grant, our research team seeks to perform an interdisciplinary investigation of the ethical technology profession to accomplish the following aims and objectives:

1. Survey and interview hiring managers to understand the skills and background workers require for such roles, and to assess the function of ethical technologists in the workplace;

2. Enlist web scraping and machine learning to identify key terms in ethical tech job listings and to identify the key components that constitute the demand for the profession;

3. Convene stakeholders from the private sector, public interest technology, and educators, in order to transition to a full research grant to investigate the ethical technology frontier as the Future of Tech Work.

Intellectual Merit: Our team combines academia and industry, and leverages the expertise of social scientists, computer scientists and engineers, and humanists in order to gain a deep understanding of this emerging profession of ethical technology, and its utility, dynamics, and impact in the broader technological ecosystem. The project fills in critical gaps in knowledge about the exact needs and function of ethical reasoning, skills, and practices in the workforce. Our mixed methods approach will contribute to theories and bring together ideas from computing, applied ethics and business with science and technology studies and science and engineering education.

Broader Impacts: Our preliminary research shows over 400 academic institutions in the United States offering courses at the intersection of ethics and technology. This research will bridge the link between education and training, and the professional utility of those skills to better identify how such skills play out in the workforce. Our research will allow universities to better understand what significance ethical tech education plays in professional contexts, and to design curricula and coursework that dynamically interacts with professional use. Simultaneously, our work will allow tech companies to make more informed decisions about who to hire for these roles, and what background and training these roles require. The research will also help build diverse and inclusive pathways for tech work by shedding light on the relationship between diversity in the tech workforce and equitable outcomes from technology. Finally, the project will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students from diverse disciplinary perspectives and backgrounds.