APPG on Diversity & Inclusion in STEM launches new project on AI equity

The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity & Inclusion in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths has launched a new project investigating Artificial Intelligence (AI) equity in STEM. A series of deep dives will start with a focus on AI’s role in gendered harms, including biased algorithms, and online abuse.

The APPG aims to promote the inclusion and progression of people from diverse backgrounds in STEM, and to encourage government, parliamentarians, academics, businesses and other stakeholders to work towards a STEM sector that is representative of the population.

The APPG is chaired by Samantha Niblett MP, Labour MP for South Derbyshire and founder of Labour: Women in Tech. The British Science Association provides the Secretariat for the Group.

Labour MP Sureena Brackenridge, Conservative peer Baroness Verma, and Crossbench peer Baroness Brown of Cambridge – who is current President of the British Science Association – are the APPG’s elected Officers for 2026-27.

Since its founding, the APPG has undertaken a series of projects on equity, diversity and inclusion in the sciences, including recent research reports on EDI strategies, and regional STEM skills inequity.

About the ‘Towards a Fairer AI Future in STEM’ project

As part of its 2026/27 work programme, the APPG will conduct a series of deep dives that explore the current failures and opportunities of AI in STEM and how a lack of diversity within the technology sector poses risk and safety and quality concerns.

AI is rapidly emerging as the most significant amplifier, and potential accelerator, of inequalities within the UK’s STEM sector in recent years.

A failure to prioritise and address equity, diversity, and inclusion principles, spanning from conceptualisation, through to coding, policy development, or assessments of risk, may well exacerbate existing gender, racial, disability, socio-economic, and regional disparities.

Risk, AI, and gendered harms

The first deep dive will focus on ‘Inclusion to mitigate risk: Risk, AI, and gendered harms’.

Through oral evidence sessions and a supporting roundtable discussion, the APPG will explore how current AI development processes failed to anticipate gendered harm; look at what the potential causes of these failures were in order to anticipate future issues; as well as how these causes could be addressed through existing policy levers.

Samantha Niblett MP, Chair of the APPG on Diversity & Inclusion in STEM, says:

“Repeated examples of gender-based harms online, such as biased algorithms discriminating against women and girls, and AI tools capable of sexualised “nudification” and image-based abuse, are not technical accidents, but are an indication that the right people were not meaningfully involved in design, testing, and oversight.

“This indicates governance failures, as well as a failure to ensure that we have a STEM sector that reflects and considers the whole of UK society.”

Hannah Russell, Chief Executive, British Science Association says:

"The AI era is here, and accelerating at pace. It comes with endless exciting possibilities and in areas such as healthcare or climate science – areas which we know people really care about. Investing in the research and development needed to ensure AI is harnessed for good is essential.”

“But the risks around its use are also very real and the damaging ways in which this technology is used are increasingly being recognised, especially in ways which have impacted women and girls. In the UK, little more than a fifth of the tech sector workforce are women – and we are now seeing the result of that exclusion in the development of AI. The APPG’s new project to understand the impact of this imbalance and how it can be changed in future will be a vital piece of research.”

The topics of the next two deep dives will be decided over the next few weeks in consultation with APPG Members, STEM sector, and EDI experts.

Call for ideas

The project has evolved from an idea submitted by multi-award-winning STEM leader and chartered biomedical scientist Bamidele Farinre, in response to the open call held by the APPG in late 2025.

In her submission on ‘Ensuring AI Equity for a Democratic UK Foundation’, Bamidele urged the APPG to use its cross-party convening ability to undertake a programme of work on EDI in AI to advance fairness and inclusive innovation for all communities in STEM.

Read the submissions to the Call for Ideas

All-Party Parliamentary Group on Diversity & Inclusion in STEM