FW-HTF-P: Assessing the profession of ethical technology for the future of tech work

The last five years of what has been called a “techlash” have pressured a growing number of technology companies and public sector workplaces to hire workers equipped to respond to ethical challenges. These challenges include addressing biased technical systems, threats to privacy, the growing information credibility crisis, and exclusionary inequities in employment.

Consequently, there is now a vision for a new kind of technologist equipped to tackle questions of ethics and equity, and a move toward a profession we call “Ethical Technology.” This profession constitutes one of the most important and quickly growing employment fields. Tech companies already have created thousands of jobs with titles such as “Ethical Hacker,” “Data Ethics and Integrity Coordinator,” and “Ethics Officer”.

However, there is little data or existing understanding about the skills, training, and knowledge these new “Ethical Technologists” need to perform these roles, or how to equip this workforce with a background that will allow them to succeed. 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.

The project further seeks to enlist this understanding in order to create a novel approach to STEM and humanities education. Such an understanding will increase the efficacy of workers in these roles and influence how universities train students for this new profession.

The project is structured around a number of complementary activities. First, the project will explore Ethical Technology as a profession and organizing concept for the future of work and assess the functions of Ethical Technologists in the workplace. The project will also identify key terms in Ethical Technology job listings and explore the key components of the profession that constitute the demand in the these listings.

The team will also convene stakeholders from the private sector, public interest technology, and education to define an Ethical Technology profession and research agenda based on the findings. Finally, the project will support development of an interdisciplinary class to pilot educational strategies to introduce students to major concepts and practices essential to this emerging profession.

The project brings together interdisciplinary expertise of social scientists, computer scientists and engineers, and humanists, whose contributions will provide an intellectually intersectional understanding of the nature of ethics and technology. Such an approach is necessary to explore and define the multiple dimensions of this emerging profession, and to produce robust knowledge about its utility, dynamics, and impact in the broader technological ecosystem.

The project thus fills in critical gaps in knowledge about the exact needs and function of ethical reasoning, skills, and practices in the workforce.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.