Bioinfo4Women Research: Women's health and sex and gender equality in AI

The Bioinfo4Women ( B4W ) initiative at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) champions the representation and achievements of women in bioinformatics and computational biology, directly contributing to ELIXIR's objectives of fostering gender equality in science. B4W enhances ELIXIR's mission through key activities such as our participation in the Biohackathon Europe (in 2021 and 2022) and Biohackathon Germany (2023), as well as co-leading the ELIXIR LEadership And Diversity mentoring programme ( ELEAD ), emphasizing the importance of addressing equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the Life Sciences.  Additionally, B4W works on a research line on women’s health and sex and gender equality in AI, including the Bias in AI Healthcare Applications (BAIHA) project, which uses ELIXIR’s OpenEBench platform for bias assessment. This research lines seeks to advance towards more inclusive health research and policy and has already produced highly cited academic publications and prestigious international collaborations. The poster will showcase the B4W role in advancing more inclusive and equitable healthcare technologies and research using ELIXIR key service collections (e.g. EGA, OpenEBench). This encompasses recent results the analysis of women’s health discussions in social media, methodologies for public engagement in science, policy recommendations, the publication of a ground-breaking book on sex and gender bias in AI , and the implementation of a train-the-trainer program funded by the EOSC-Life project on the integration of sex and gender dimension in research, with materials openly available to the training community.