Julie Wenah

At Airbnb I was Community Senior Counsel and Acting Regional Counsel for Africa. I designed the governance for Project Lighthouse, the award-winning system Airbnb built with civil rights organizations to measure racial gaps in bookings. Perceived race was never stored next to anyone’s identity; we used k-anonymity and one-way encryption so the data couldn’t be traced back to a person.

At Meta I was Associate General Counsel and Product & Accessibility Lead for Civil Rights. I designed the governance for Meta’s race data measurement work, which used secure multiparty computation so the company could measure fairness across race without learning any one person’s answer. I also created Project Height, named for Dorothy Height: an equity framework for product teams, plus a scholarship program that put more than $250,000 toward future civil rights technologists.

I was a named expert contributor to the Partnership on AI’s 2023 paper Eyes Off My Data, which examined how Apple used differential privacy to check its IDs in Wallet feature for bias.

If a system can decide something about you, someone has to be able to ask it how.

At the Department of Commerce, I was Counselor and Policy Advisor and worked on the Obama Administration’s 2014 Big Data report. At the White House, I vetted nominees for presidential boards and commissions and worked in the Office of the First Lady. I was later appointed to the FCC’s Communications Equity and Diversity Council, where I co-chaired the Innovation and Access Working Group.

Today I chair the Digital Civil Rights Coalition, advise companies on AI and biometric governance, and I’m building a company that helps product teams catch discrimination risk before launch.