How will AI impact women in the workplace?

The rise of AI is presenting challenges but also opportunities for women in the workplace. Here’s what you need to know about AI at work.

From ChatGPT to automated hiring, artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly visible in our everyday working lives. Its influence is being felt across a huge range of industries – everywhere from banking to Hollywood.

It may feel slightly unsettling to think about how AI could impact your own job – but worth arming yourself with the knowledge needed to sidestep any potential career turbulence it could create.

For women especially, who can already face workplace barriers like wage gaps and the juggle of work and caregiving responsibilities, it’s worth thinking about how to use AI to your advantage.

According to UNESCO, research presents a mixed picture on how women are currently being impacted by AI – on the one hand, it may be cementing unhelpful gender biases; on the other, it could be creating safer workplaces.

Here’s a taster on some of the ways AI is impacting women in the workplace – and how you might be able to use it to help future-proof your own career.

Is AI replacing jobs?

Firstly, what even is AI? The University of Melbourne’s Professor Leah Ruppanner defines it as “the use of data and algorithms to create more efficient decision-making”. It has a huge range of applications – anything from chatbots answering customer enquiries to disease detection and diagnosis in medicine.

Ruppanner says AI should be thought of as related to but distinct from ‘automation’, which is taking tasks typically done by a human, like meatpacking or fruitpicking, and giving them to a machine.

So, is AI coming for our jobs? Quite possibly. A recent report from Goldman Sachs estimated generative AI – like ChatGPT – could impact 300 million jobs globally, citing administrative and legal services roles as some of the most affected.

Some sectors may be more immune to the impacts of AI and automation because they involve people-centred work, such as nursing, teaching, childcare and aged care, which are, interestingly, professions currently dominated by women.

Ruppanner points out that as well as replacing or changing some jobs – AI is also creating new ones as people need to supervise or monitor how the tech operates. For example, you could already consider becoming an AI trainer or prompt engineer or even an AI-focused ethicist.

Does AI reinforce gender stereotypes?

While AI and machine learning may help make some types of work more efficient, some experts have flagged its potential to cement rather than improve gendered stereotypes.

According to UNESCO’s 2022 report, “The Effects of AI on the Working Lives of Women”, some AI systems may reinforce gendered tropes around care and assistance work.

“For example, the feminine voice of virtual personal assistants (VPAs) like Alexa and Siri can reinforce the stereotype that women are meant to care, assist and attend to the home, and to the needs of people in that home,” it says.

A 2021 report by the UK’s Alan Turing Institute, ‘Where are the women? Mapping the gender job gap in AI’, suggests that the current lack of women working in data science can create dangerous “feedback loops” that bake in gender biases to AI and machine learning systems.

“The data used to train algorithms may under-represent certain groups or encode historical bias against marginalised demographics, due to prior decisions on what data to collect, and how it is curated,” it says.

“A number of studies on computer vision have also highlighted encoded biases related to gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, and other identities. For instance, facial recognition software successfully identifies the faces of white men but fails to recognise those of dark-skinned women.”

The institute says many more women are needed in the AI and data science professions to avoid these kinds of biases becoming further entrenched.

AI could reduce gender bias in the hiring process

One potentially positive impact of AI for women is that it could be used to decrease gender bias in the hiring process – which could be particularly useful for the STEM sector.

The AFR reported earlier this year that researchers “found that human recruiters hiring for a web designer role scored women ‘substantially lower’ than men when they knew their gender, but equal to men when the gender was hidden.”

The study found that using the AI tool in the recruitment process almost doubled the number of women considered to be in the top 10 per cent of candidates.

While more research in this area is needed, it could signal the benefits of using AI in recruitment.

Using AI to fight workplace sexual harassment

AI apps are also being used to stamp out gender-based harassment in workplaces.

According to UNESCO, AI firm NexLP has developed #MeTooBots that monitor communications between colleagues and flag bullying and sexual harassment in documents, emails and chat.

Companies such as Gfycat use AI to combat harassment from deepfakes by searching for similar images online; the Brazil-based Think Eva tracks harassing emails, texts and comments; and the Callisto and AllVoices apps enable people to report harassment when it occurs.

We need more women working in AI

There’s currently a big gender gap in the AI workforce itself. UNESCO points to studies that have found “only 18% of authors at leading AI conferences are women and more than 80% of AI professors are men”.

To counter this imbalance and make AI more beneficial for us all, more women need to train, upskill or reskill in data science and have a seat at the decision-making table. With the right training, you could land a role as a machine-learning engineer, data scientist, AI researcher or ethics specialist.

The demand for these kinds of roles is set to increase significantly over the coming years so, whether you want to move into the industry, know more about AI and gender, or gain a fundamental understanding of how AI works, it’s a career investment that will no doubt pay dividends.

Interested in learning more about how AI could impact your career? Our Six-week, 100% online Melbourne Microcert, Artificial Intelligence and Women is packed with essential resources and strategies.