How can we make sure women aren’t left behind in the AI revolution?

I recently attended The City Quantum and AI Conference held in London, where we heard from a number of excellent speakers and panellists across a diverse set of industries both public and private sector. It was great to also see that not only did the panel represent a diverse set of organisations, but the speakers themselves were also a diverse group. There were some excellent female speakers and I came away feeling hopeful for the future. However, as promising as this is, while the speaking roster may have diversified, if you look around the various conference halls - particularly in crypto, blockchain and quantum events - the audience is still likely to be male-dominated. It’s a stark reminder that there is still much work to do to ensure women are fully represented at all levels in technology and particularly in the emerging tech space.

This takes me back to an event I recently had the pleasure of speaking at (AI in Financial Services hosted by Arena International), which looked at this very question: how we can we make financial services more diverse and inclusive and ensure that more women have an opportunity to work in AI?

Over the past 18 months so much has been written about AI – on topics ranging from the potential it has to improve diagnosis, treatment and research in healthcare to concerns that robots are going to take over the world or that many jobs will be made redundant. But very little of the coverage has looked at the significant under-representation of women in the AI field, something which needs to be addressed if we are to close the gender pay gap and ensure diverse teams are built for the future.

Studies have shown that women are under-represented in the field of AI in the UK (and indeed globally). In 2024, only 21% of AI professionals in the UK were female, while women in AI are more likely to occupy lower-status, lower-paying roles like data preparation and analytics and have less of an opportunity to develop AI technology. The Alan Turing Institute found that the percentage of women working in engineering and cloud computing was even lower - 14% and 9% respectively. There is also a lack of gender balance in leadership positions with research suggesting that women account for less than 10% of Chief Technology Officer roles globally. So, while CTOs are making decisions on the use of AI that will shape tomorrow’s workplace, the lack of a woman’s perspective means that their views, needs and experiences are potentially being neglected particularly in fields such as pharmaceuticals and medical research.

The benefits of a diverse workplace are clear for all to see. Diverse organisations can draw on a wide range of perspectives from across their business and this can help to ensure they represent a wide range of needs. Research in the US by Vanguard found that active equity funds with gender-balanced investment teams tend to outperform those that have all-male or all-female teams - funds managed by single-gender teams underperformed their benchmarks by 12 basis points on average, while funds managed by mixed-gender teams outperformed their benchmarks by an average of 10 basis points. And the benefit was even greater (23 basis points) when teams were made up of 50% women and 50% men.

So how do we rectify this problem? Well, if we start by taking a closer look at the make ups of our organisations we can try to effect change during the hiring process and tackle the reluctance to take on people without experience that I mentioned earlier. One way of doing this could be through offering entry-level apprenticeships and opportunities to develop AI-specific skills through training programmes and workshops. Although there are some great women working in this space, we need to shine a brighter light on their work to encourage a larger pipeline to enter the field, highlighting their achievements and contributions and engaging men as allies to promote gender diversity and inclusion in AI.

It’s really important to remove ‘unconscious bias’ and be aware of inherent patterns of thinking, and how these might lead to a lack of inclusion, as you may (without realising it) be more receptive to the ideas and views of people like you. At FSCS, inclusion is built into every aspect of our talent management strategy, from inclusive job descriptions to unconscious bias training for hiring managers, to working with specialist job boards and actively empowering employees to work flexibly. We have made great progress since joining HM Treasury’s Women in Finance Charter, which aims to promote gender diversity in financial services. Since becoming a signatory in 2018, FSCS has reduced its gender pay gap from 18% in favour of men to 2.8% in favour of men in 2023/24, while 75% of our Board members are female and four out of the six current members of our Executive Team are female.

A by-product of the lack of representation of women in the AI field is that women are disadvantaged in all sorts of areas due to biases in AI software such as Chat GPT. For example, fewer women are shown top-level jobs on platforms like LinkedIn, and recruitment software often favours men over women for managerial jobs, based on historical data which is skewed more towards men. Likewise, algorithms designed to optimise loan approvals may inadvertently offer less favourable terms to female borrowers compared to their male counterparts.

Returning to representation in the technology and AI fields, to some extent, the impact we feel is as much about who is not in the room with a chance to shape and influence new technology as it develops, as it is about who is in the room.

Ensuring speakers and panellists at industry events are diverse, with a good gender balance is a good start. Julia Sutcliffe, Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Business and Trade and Elham Kashefi, Chief Scientist and Head of Quantum Software Lab at the National Quantum Computing Centre, who I heard at the recent conference, show what women can achieve in the tech field. However, if we want to encourage innovation and ensure that our industry can attract the widest pool of talent, we need an inclusive culture that empowers everyone to be part of the creative process and provides space for experimentation and celebrating and showcasing innovation. As we make commitments about AI and harnessing its huge potential, we should also make a commitment to do everything we can to ensure inclusivity and diversity in the area.