Gender Parity in AI Strategy Key for Transformative Goals
Women at Tech workplace (Image credit (GroakAI)
Employment AI Strategy Must Align with Gender Parity Goal
By Pradeep Kumar Panda
Bhubaneswar, April 9: Although women represent less than one-third of AI talent on the platform, there is reason to believe that not all the observed skills gap between men and women reflect true disparities in skills held, but that some part of it reflects differences in how men and women list skills on the LinkedIn platform.
This may be true for a few reasons. First, over half of men and women who have an AI literacy skill (63.4% of men and 53.8% of women) also have at least one AI engineering skill listed, compared to only 2.9% and 1.6% of men and women with no AI literacy skill listed.
Put another way, men with AI literacy skills listed are over 20 times as likely as men with no AI literacy skills to have AI engineering skills. For women, that increases to 33.6 times more likely. Almost 90% of men who have an AI literacy skill list have at least one disruptive tech or AI engineering skill, as do 79.2% of women. Thus, these early adopters of AI literacy skills are likely highly technical and in these disruptive tech skill areas. However, that is truer for men than it is for women.
Second, AI engineering skills may reflect differences in propensities to list skills on LinkedIn, as the share of female AI engineering talent increases by 9 percentage points, from 29.8% to 37.7%, when accounting for implicit skills deduced from their profiles but not listed directly by themselves.
A gender bias in self-reporting, however, should not foster complacency with gender gaps in AI skilling and re-skilling. Research from Randstad suggests that employers seem to be prioritizing AI upskilling training among male employees across all economies surveyed in the study, apart from Belgium and India.
Moreover, with skilling being centred as the uncontested strategy for navigating workforce transformation, there is a risk of overlooking other areas where AI can add value and close gender gaps, including pay, career advancement, and occupational and industrial gender segregation.
Skilling women for AI roles will not eliminate the persistent disparities in both leadership representation and career progression. AI has the potential to help revalue work by automating labour-intensive tasks in clerical and administrative roles, areas that are traditionally feminized and underpaid.
By integrating AI into these functions, pathways can be created to reevaluate work in areas such as communication, decision-making and relational tasks – lower-value roles that are also predominantly performed by women.
Furthermore, AI integration in areas as mundane as the synchronization of administrative workflows and routine functions can provide organizations with the opportunity to implement broader shifts in business models, organizational structures and AI-driven decision-making.
Transparent and fair processes for hiring, performance evaluation and promotion will be a critical element in building more balanced workforce and leadership pipelines for women to reap the full benefits from AI augmentation.
Today, 99% of Fortune 500 companies use some form of automation in their hiring processes. As these processes become widespread, it will be critical to document the extent to which AI agents can overcome and overturn gender gaps in existing training data.
Gender gaps reflected in training data are concerning to the extent that they inform AI-driven recruitment systems that favour the competencies, performance markers and trajectories of male candidates. The true challenge for AI in the workforce is not just mitigating bias but actively expanding the talent pool by identifying and including individuals who are often overlooked.
Hiring and performance evaluations are among the most powerful levers for advancing women’s careers. Before AI, organizations relied on gender-blind hiring policies and standardized interviews to promote diversity, yet systemic bias persisted beyond recruitment. Performance evaluations also frequently reflect subjective gendered assessments of potential.
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AI could transform this process by implementing better-tuned assessments, creating new pathways for underrepresented talent to be recognized and advanced in the workforce.
Fair, AI-driven recruitment and evaluation processes can be a game-changer for gender parity, enabling women to be assessed more accurately and ensuring equitable access to leadership opportunities.
In turn, employers can expand their workforce’s potential, make better talent decisions and provide personalized development opportunities.
Technological disruptions call for re-design: tech can boost growth and close gender gaps in participation, leadership, ownership and innovation.
As technology becomes central to business transformation and economic productivity, there are immediate areas where leaders can take action to capitalize on the full spectrum of AI talent, AI leadership, AI industry potential and AI innovation available today.
AI-driven economic growth will be strongest where gender parity is embedded in its design – a virtuous circle where: Industry and policy goals are aligned to address gender disparities skewing the tech transition, from design to development to adoption.
Parity in skilling and reskilling brings equal access to opportunities and rewards in the future of work, in both AI and non-AI roles.
Industry practices and mindsets remove biases in workforce representation and leadership that limit productivity and innovation. Increased female participation in the tech transition leads to improved innovation outcomes, with applications better tailored to changing populations and with more efficient uptakes.
Parity in resourcing nurtures the innovation ecosystem. Increased representation in the data translates to better learning models with more discerning outcomes.
For industry leaders, the case is clear: companies that fail to integrate gender parity into AI strategy will miss out on half of the available talent, reducing their capacity for innovation and long-term competitiveness.
For policymakers, AI can be adopted as a driver of workforce transformation, economic dynamism and social integration, ensuring that AI-driven economies are not only moving forward, but doing so by growing the proverbial pie.
AI is more than a tool – it is a vehicle for economic and social transformation. Decisive, discerning leaders who recognize this and act now will shape the future of AI-driven growth, ensuring that its benefits extend to all.
(Opinion expressed in the article solely belongs to author)
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