Will AI Reduce Gender Bias in Hiring?
Would women be better off if AI and algorithms were in charge of hiring? There are clearly reasons to be hopeful. One of the big advantages of AI is that, aside from being better at spotting things (i.e., millions of data points), it is also superior at ignoring things. AI can be trained to ignore people’s gender and focus only on the relevant signals of talent or potential. For example, algorithms can be trained to pick up relevant signals of EQ, competence, or communication skills, while being truly blind to gender. This would definitely favor women. If AI is trained to identify the actual drivers of performance – defined broadly as an individual’s contribution to the organization — then we can expect a much fairer, more accurate, and replicable assessment of people’s potential than what humans can do. This, again, should be good for women.
AI is disrupting every area of life, including how organizations find talent . Companies are generally aware of the ROI that comes from finding the right person for the right job. McKinsey estimated that, for highly complex roles, stars can be expected to produce 800% more than average performers. And a recent Harvard Business School study showed that there are even bigger benefits to avoiding toxic workers.
Despite this crucial role of talent, organizations are still unable to attract the right talent, relying more on intuitive rather than data-driven talent identification practices — especially at the top, where the stake are actually highest. Indeed, too many leaders are hired on the basis of their technical expertise, political influence, or interview performance. As I illustrate in my latest book , Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders?: (And How to Fix It), most companies focus on the wrong traits, hiring on confidence rather than competence, charisma rather than humility, and narcissistic tendencies rather than integrity, which explains the surplus of incompetent and male leaders. The result is a pathological disconnect between the qualities that seduce us in a leader, and those that are needed to be an effective leader.
An interesting question that arises is to what degree new technologies within the brave new world of AI-based hiring tools could help us reduce error, noise, and bias in our talent identification processes. For example, would women be better off if AI and algorithms were in charge of hiring? Previous research has highlighted a clear inconsistency around gender and leadership. On the one hand, women are often evaluated more negatively by others – even when there are few granular behavioral differences between women and men. On the other hand, large scale meta-analyses suggest that women have a slight advantage when it comes to the soft skills that predispose individuals to be more effective leaders, and that they generally adopt more effective leadership styles than men do. For instance, if leaders were selected on the basis of their emotional intelligence, self-awareness, humility, integrity, and coachability, the majority of leaders would be female rather than male .
And yet there have been salient news stories recently indicating that AI may actually contribute to even more bias and adverse impact against women–and that when algorithms are trained to emulate human recruiters, they may not just reproduce human biases, but also exacerbate them, engaging in a much more efficient form of discrimination.
To be sure, we are much more easily shocked and scandalized by hiring mistakes done by AI, than by human errors or biases. It’s a bit like with self-driving cars: it takes one autonomous car crash to convince us that the technology is flawed, but we are OK with having 1.2 million fatal accidents and 50 million driving injuries per year, courtesy of humans.
