Going beyond binary at TechForGood

The demand for technological skills is expected to rise 55% by 2030. In the same timeframe, increasing automation will require 75 to 375 million workers, globally, to change jobs or upgrade their skills. How can organizations and workers prepare?

This was a core question at last week’s TechForGood Summit in Paris. Hosted by President Emmanuel Macron, there was insightful discussion on the future of technology in our societies, with particular focus on education, work, and inclusion and diversity (I&D). I joined the conversation on how we can achieve equality and diversity in the new machine age. The French Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, led the discussion around three important topics; increasing gender and ethnic representation in technology organisations, radically increasing numbers of women and minorities in reskilling programmes, and preventing unconscious bias in artificial intelligence (AI).

Increasing gender and ethnic representation in technology organisations

More diverse executive teams, including gender and ethnicity, are statistically more likely to experience above-average profitability. While there is an underrepresentation of female in leadership throughout the corporate world, technology has one of the greatest disparities. In North America, women in technology companies represent 30% of managerial roles and 17% of executive roles, versus 37%  and 20% across other industries, respectively. To increase representation, technology companies must promote I&D through strategies and ecosystems that reflect their business ethos and priorities; from committed CEO-led cascades to aligning targeted performance metrics enhanced by I&D (i.e. productivity, risk management and customer retention).

Radically increasing numbers of women and minorities in reskilling programmes

With a growing need for more technological skills, there is a huge opportunity to boost diversity by attracting and hiring the right talent in AI research and development. While automation will reduce the number of human work hours needed for many jobs, the number of human hours the technology sector will need to develop and advance AI will grow. Reskilling programs offer tech companies an opening to train more women and minorities in the skills the sector needs.

Preventing unconscious bias in AI

While progress with AI presents huge opportunities, it also comes with the risk of embedding human biases into next-generation software algorithms, which have a tendency to remain undetected by their developers. If we continue as we are today, many of our learnings and statistically based predictive approaches will continue to assume our future will be like our past. Increasing I&D in technology organisations, as addressed above, will help to reduce unconscious biases, as well as improving efforts to capture and regulate best practices in the industry.

These are positive steps organisations – both start-ups and incumbents – can take to be more inclusive and diverse, but they are not the only levers we should pull. As with many things, inclusion and diversity starts at home. It must be part of our lives from the beginning, woven into our children’s educational systems and as they enter the world of work. The most important takeaway is to start doing something, now. Any action, in any organisation – big or small – will speak louder than words.