Can AI Be Feminist? Rewriting the Code for Pay Equity
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The original idea behind AI was to establish a standard framework for employment decisions, yet it instead mirrored existing gender inequalities at a wide scale. Research indicates that AI devices maintain and enforce such gender inequalities on a much larger scale.
Salary prediction models produce low payments for women’s work because their training data includes years of discriminatory wage disparities. AI-powered hiring tools favour male candidates over female candidates because they measure evaluation data towards male performance history. AI-driven compensation models used to adjust remote work pay adversely affect women employees who compose 54% of the remote workforce population
Questions about AI bias do not exist since AI exhibits clear discriminatory behavior. It’s: Can AI be feminist? Is it possible to rewrite programming code to overcome rather than maintain the inherited inequalities?
AI Is Only as Fair as the World That Built It
The problem isn’t AI itself. The technology functions as a regulatory instrument by displaying existing industrial biases from past systems. A computer system receives data from an environment that pays women 20 percent less than men for equal work, so it will process this unequal pay as standard practice. The algorithm concludes that women lack executive qualifications because the training set lacks enough female leaders.
Research from 2021 by the National Bureau of Economic Research showed that AI hiring systems eliminated female candidates from technical positions due to previous male-biased hiring decisions that served as the training data. According to another McKinsey report, companies that maintain diverse executive teams demonstrate increased profit performance of 25% when compared to their competition, but AI performance evaluations fail to accurately recognize women's collaborative leadership styles and mentoring skills.
AI systems currently function to distribute inequality without making any improvement when they operate without controls.
Reprogramming AI for Pay Equity
So how do we break the cycle? How do we stop AI from reinforcing the biases it was trained on?
? Companies Leading the Way Some organizations are proving that AI can be a tool for equity—if designed with intention. Take Salesforce, for example. After an internal audit revealed gender-based pay disparities, the company didn’t just manually correct them—it built an AI-powered pay equity platform to actively identify and correct wage gaps in real time.
Another example: LinkedIn redesigned its AI-powered job recommendations after discovering that women were less likely to apply for roles that didn’t match 100% of their qualifications. Now, the platform suggests jobs differently based on behavior patterns, closing the confidence gap in hiring.
These cases prove that AI can be programmed not just to reflect the world as it is, but to build the world as it should be.
? The Role of Women in AI Leadership There’s an old saying in computer science: “garbage in, garbage out.” If the people designing AI systems lack diverse perspectives, the outputs will reflect that narrow worldview. Women make up less than 20% of the AI workforce and an even smaller percentage of AI leadership. If we want AI to challenge bias, we need more women building, training, and governing these systems.
Female leadership within AI projects results in better ethical choices and higher accountability combined with more extensive outcomes that maintain inclusiveness. The true solution requires women to actively take part in designing AI architecture instead of simply being included on teams.
? AI Regulation & Transparency AI needs guardrails. Right now, most AI-driven compensation models operate behind closed doors, with little oversight on how pay decisions are made. Companies must be required to:
The European Union has already taken steps toward AI transparency laws, and California has introduced regulations requiring pay transparency in job postings. But we need global accountability. AI should never be used as a legal shield for discrimination.
The Future of AI is Still Unwritten
AI's destiny remains INSCRIBABLE
AI receives its power from the developers behind its creation along with their implementation of fairness. If programmers do not intervene, it will create new inequalities that will shape our future. AI can function as a fair tool when humans purposefully design it with proper oversight standards and inclusivity principles.
Now, over to you:
Do you think AI can reach genuine unbiased levels beyond human historical legacies?