“In 2020, less than half (46.9%) of all women participated in the labor force, declining from 51.0% in 1990 and only a minuscule 2.6% were found to be CEOs of Fortune Global 500 companies.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has severely impacted women, with more of them being laid off, having had to stall their careers, or jeopardizing their financial security. The pandemic has intensified the challenges that women already faced at work.

Gender bias is a form of unconscious bias that occurs when individuals unconsciously attribute certain stereotypes and attitudes to another person or group.

Over the years, with much awareness and understanding, we thought we could tackle gender inequality, but the reality is far from what we believed it to be.

• Today, 42% of women experience gender discrimination at work.
• Both men and women are twice as likely to hire a male candidate.
• Half of the men believe women are well-represented at their company when 90% of senior leaders are men.

Gender bias can happen at all stages of recruiting, hiring, and retaining employees.

Some of the popular examples of Gender bias during various stages being:

• Job descriptions that predominantly target only one gender.
• Hiring managers who weed out any female applicants just because of the gender not suiting the role.
• Interview questions such as parental plans and responsibilities are asked to women but not to men.
• Male managers are feeling uncomfortable training or mentoring female candidates.
• A long-standing pay gap of 17% between males and females

These were only the tip of the iceberg; numerous examples of gender bias right from posting job descriptions to retaining an employee are visible all across the industry.

Gender bias is not an option if organizations want to move faster in this post-COVID world. Taking cognizance of this reality, talent managers & HR leaders are devising strategies to eliminate gender bias, in some cases, even relying on insights from AI as well.

Fighting Bias With Artificial Intelligence

Today’s enterprises have turned to Artificial Intelligence as a very powerful tool crucial to augmenting the capabilities of a hiring manager and enabling them to eliminate bias in all stages and objectively identify and manage the workforce.

AI makes human processes and decisions more efficient and less biased. This means it can become an equalizer, reducing decisions for people—who are naturally subject to their own unconscious biases.

Let’s have a look at how AI is helping eliminate gender inequality at work :

Objective assessments

One of the finest qualities of AI is its ability to work with data objectively. AI is helping fine-tune talent management processes, including hiring, training, and retention.

Features such as blind hiring are helping organizations hire without prejudice coming in between. AI has the capability to objectively identify candidates, onboard them, plan their careers, and prepare training programs for them.

Skills-based Career progression

AI helps in identifying next-generation critical roles and skills needed to fulfill these roles. If the existing skillsets don’t match future roles, it can identify skills, tools, and certifications required for next-gen job roles to enable organization-wide reskilling.

Guided by data, it can construct reskilling paths and strategies needed for tomorrow. AI can also develop short-term and long-term career trajectories for your workforce and who needs them the most.

360-degree Talent Analysis

AI can map out the entire workforce and correctly represent gender roles across the organization. It can also dive deep and find out ethnic and racial diversity that can help manage a diverse workforce. A 360-degree talent analysis lets you know who is where and what they need the most right now. Such comprehensive analysis of the entire organization can change how we organize people within our work environment.

Diverse workforce planning

Along with a 360-degree talent analysis, one of the best ways AI can be used is in planning your workforce by keeping a focus on diversity. We’ve already covered how a diverse and inclusive workforce can help organizations, and careful planning is crucial.

With proper workforce planning, growth can be doubled or tripled, and one of the essential parts of workforce planning is diversity planning. With AI, you can carefully plan your workforce by balancing gender roles and managing diverse individuals.

Using Draup for Talent, HR leaders can visualize diversity, manage talent, prepare career paths and identify missing pieces in an organization’s skill set.

Tools such as diversity navigator, reskilling navigator, and workforce planner are already being used by numerous organizations to tackle gender inequality at various levels and maintain a balanced workforce.

Being an analytics-driven talent management tool, it can eliminate challenges and make management a fact-based, objective, and systematic process.