How AI can help drive gender inclusion in tech

May 16, 2024 3:27:17 PM

"AI brings with it the opportunity for women to reinvent themselves and reskill for a more digitally-driven environment," writes Archana Arakkal

Women at a desk with a laptop and two screens

By Archana Arakkal, Practice Lead: Intelligent Data Engineering at Synthesis Technologies

While many South African women find it challenging to access positions in the ICT sector in general, the recent interest in artificial intelligence (AI) provides them with a perfect platform to acquire new skills to access more specialist jobs. AI brings with it the opportunity for women to reinvent themselves and reskill for a more digitally-driven environment. Women can embrace the new wave of technology to align their skill sets to better reflect the agile needs of modern organisations.

Of course, AI opens the doors for all genders to embrace the thought revolution currently underway in ICT. This starts at a young age with learners getting access to more information about STEM that appeals to their curiosity in how the Fourth Revolution is improving the world around them. Over the years, some of humanity has been lost when it comes to skills development.

People have had to become more corporate-focused and, as a result, more thick-skinned to approach their jobs like machines. Emotional intelligence has fallen by the wayside in the push to become more efficient due especially in the ICT sector. However, AI brings with it the opportunity to move more mundane jobs to the machines and enable people to strengthen their softer skills to deliver strategic value. Freeing up this capacity to build more emotional intelligence can help people across genders become more fulfilled. Women and men bring with them different approaches. It is therefore not a ‘one versus the other’ scenario. Teams that benefit from these respective skill sets stand to become more dynamic, agile, and relevant to modern organisational needs.

Changing perceptions

One of the ways to change legacy thinking around gender roles in ICT is to move beyond the perceptions that tech is just about coding or building hardware. The sector has become so diverse that it offers something for people with any interests. For instance, if you are a painter there are opportunities in graphic design. For analytically-minded people there are opportunities to be project managers. The list goes on.

Changing perceptions and giving people visibility into the options available to them in tech must therefore be prioritised at a grassroots level. This is where it is important for the ICT sector to provide support where needed. I have been fortunate that all the companies I have been involved in have given me this support to break through the glass ceiling. I, like many other females in tech, want to help create even more support mechanisms to make the industry more accessible to females.

This also requires those in senior positions to make time for people trying to break into ICT. It is therefore essential to drive a realisation that technology caters for people across genders with all interests. Techies are not only passionate gamers, but they can be rock climbers, gardeners, motoring enthusiasts, fitness junkies, and so on.

So, instead of the ICT sector focusing on what makes us different, the spotlight must be on what brings us together. And that is where the genuine interest in technology comes in. Whether you are a man or woman, people in tech love tech. They want to innovate and break boundaries.

In a very direct way, this helps organisations across verticals solve the problems they face daily. By putting more effort into unifying people across genders and not the discrepancies, the ICT sector can truly drive change with AI being one of the game-changing enablers to do so.

Archana is pursuing her PhD in Privacy - preserving AI and multi-agent reinforcement learning. She is a thought leader for AI in Africa and has many machine learning community affiliations. She is a specialist engineer within the Data and AI practice.

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