Donating to Queer in AI

We need monetary support to help with our scholarships programs and event organization. Your support helps us provide aid to queer folks in need and organize workshops to provide a platform for queer research. Donate to Queer in AI at this link.

Your donation helps Queer in AI in the following ways:

Queer in AI is a community of over 1200 queer and ally students, scientists, and practitioners in machine learning, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, robotics, cognitive science, and related fields. Queer in AI’s mission is to make the AI/ML community one that welcomes, supports, and values queer scientists.

Queer in AI works to help the queer AI community with many programs:

• Workshops to highlight the work of queer scholars, as well discussing issues that affect our community;

• Socials and meetups to build community;

• Mentoring for undergraduates, graduate school applicants, and faculty applicants;

• Scholarships and microgrants for graduate school application fees and emergency needs;

• Advocacy to make conferences, schools, and policy more diverse and inclusive of queer people;

• Participatory creation of technologies by and for queer people.

Community Building

Queer in AI organizes workshops at conferences like NeurIPS, ICML, and NAACL, featuring a wide array of speakers, panels, mentoring, and work submitted by queer researchers. We organized socials at AAAI, AAMAS, ICLR, FAACT, ACL, and other conferences. In our annual demographic survey (n=214), 67% of queer AL/ML of respondents identified lack of community 64% identified lack of role models as obstacles to becoming AL/ML practitioners. These events met this overwhelming need in our community, showcasing queer researchers, artists, and activists in AL/ML, and providing welcoming and affirming spaces for socializing and networking. The expenses for such events are usually spent on speaker honoraria, venue rentals and catering.

Direct Aid

Graduate School Application Fee Scholarship : Queer people disproportionately experience financial hardship for many reasons, including employment discrimination and lack of family support. Queer in AI, together with oSTEM, runs several scholarship and direct aid programs to provide small but highly impactful financial aid to the queer community. Graduate schools are incredible opportunities for queer people, critical for pursuing careers in AI/ML, and, more broadly, for many pursuing their dreams to help their communities and opportunities to move to queer-friendly locations. However, applying to graduate school can cost well over $1000 USD. Each school charges application fees, tests such as the TOEFL and GRE cost hundreds, and many schools require expensive third party vetting of international applicants’ transcripts. Many schools do not offer fee waivers, or require onerous documentation that can be impossible for many applicants to obtain.

Queer in AI runs a graduate school application fee scholarship, providing up to $750 to help cover fees. In 2022 we expanded this program by over 5x to meet need, disbursing over $41,000 to 50 queer scientists to help them pursue grad school. Scholarship recipients were incredibly diverse, including every continent but Antarctica and 60% of whom identified as Black, Indigenous, or a person of color. Our 2021 program allowed 51% of applicants to take admissions tests, 43% to avoid skipping on essentials, 31% to avoid skipping on groceries and food, 29% to avoid skipping bills, and 11% to avoid skipping rent.

Emergency Aid Program: Queer people often have little savings for financial emergencies. Unexpected medical bills, school fees, or a need for temporary housing to escape an abusive situation can derail studies, careers, and lives. Queer in AI co-organizers an emergency aid program with oSTEM that provides fast-turnaround microgrants to queer people experiencing financial crisis to address this need.