Punnam Raju Manthena, Co-Founder & CEO at Tekskills Inc. Partnering with clients across the globe in their digital transformation journeys.
The gender gap in the workplace remains a key business and economic issue. Back in 2015, a McKinsey report found that reducing the gender gap could add about $12 trillion to $28 trillion to the global GDP by 2025. In 2024, the chief economist for the World Bank stated that closing the gender gap “could raise global gross domestic product by more than 20%.” For years, business leaders have been called on to deal with gender equality as an economic need and fundamental right, but progress is still stalled.
According to findings from BlackRock, companies “with the most diverse workforces outperformed their country and industry group peers with the least-diverse workforces in terms of return on assets.” Businesses with about 30% women in senior positions are 15% more profitable, as per the Victorian Government. This same report found that Australia’s GDP would go up by 11% if the gender gap closed.
All these point to a serious need for gender equality. So, not only is gender equality beneficial to business and society but equally importantly, gender inequality is detrimental to both. But, as an employer, how do you move toward gender equality? Can AI, the supposed game changer in the IT industry, help gender equality?
The AI Opportunity
The advent of AI could potentially open employment doors for women in a big way. AI, or AI-driven automation, is creating several jobs or roles that we did not think of earlier. Aside from technical skills, AI-related roles call for focused nature, communication, collaboration, adaptability, ability to learn, critical thinking, problem-solving, functional knowledge, etc.
AI is data-driven and, hence, has the potential to be unbiased—but only if properly trained. Leveraging AI, employers could help develop more inclusive practices in hiring, appraising, awarding hikes, promoting and dealing with career breaks. This could help negate gender-induced interferences and discrimination. Employers could use AI to help rewrite pay-related policies or identify employees who may otherwise get passed over for promotions or those who may leave.
Using AI, employers could gather data from multiple sources, viz. incidents, surveys, etc., to identify harassment possibilities, and provide for anonymous reporting, enabling more employees to report without fearing retaliation. This could help businesses build a safe online working environment with a focus on reducing workplace harassment.
In doing so, organizations can create a supportive environment and prioritize mitigating the risks associated with workplace misconduct. That said, human intervention is crucial due to the risks associated with AI.
Challenges Associated With AI And Gender Bias
However, gender bias in AI is still a very real issue and risk. Women make up only about 33% of the tech employees and only 8% of the managerial roles as per PWC, so have the representation needed to address these biases. A study by the Berkeley Haas Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership analyzed 133 AI systems in multiple domains and saw that about 44% of them showed gender prejudice.
There could be inherent and unintentional gender biases in systems, and since AI works with the available data, these already-existent prejudices may come into play. These prejudices, social barriers, notions, etc., are all hard to break and are difficult to get beyond.
Therefore, AI ethics is paramount in this discussion. The tech industry needs to get more women in AI to counter this issue consciously. According to UN Women, “The AI field needs more women, and that requires enabling and increasing girls’ and women’s access to and leadership in STEM and ICT education and careers.”
To overcome these barriers, tech leaders need to eliminate these biases. We need to ensure women engineers, developers and coders are involved in the creation and training of AI systems. We need to ensure we’re genuinely creating a level playing field in hiring, learning, upskilling, appraising and advancing opportunities. To turn things around and achieve greater gender equality at work, we need to prioritize inclusivity when developing these systems, and having many perspectives involved in developing and training AI models can help negate gender-oriented biases.
Business leaders need to carefully monitor and advise when implementing AI in HR functions. Human oversight is key to the ethical use of the technology.
Employers should ensure their HR teams develop clear and transparent goals, a mature data strategy, proper deployment (of proven tools, technologies and sources), awareness creation, and regular evaluation and course correction where necessary, etc. These guidelines should then be shared with employees at all levels to ensure the company is on the same page.
Employers have the potential to create a level playing field in hiring, upskilling, appraising, etc.—to help achieve greater gender equality at work. AI could be a potential asset in a larger gender equality strategy.
Those creating AI systems for employers need to develop and train these AI models to negate gender-oriented perspectives; it falls on employers to reframe policies, build a safe online environment and create a supportive environment.
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