Despite the efforts of governments and organizations, men still dominate boardrooms around the world. AI could be part of the solution – helping organizations to level the playing field and drive culture change.

It’s well documented that organizations with diverse workforces are more successful. As a result, organizations have moved beyond the ‘why’ – the economic imperative – to the ‘how’.
Unfortunately, the ‘how’ is where organizations are getting stuck. On the one hand, government quotas have brought results: all French, Italian and Norwegian companies had at least three women directors on their boards at the end of 2017. In 2018, the top 100 listed companies in Australia even managed to hit 30% without a quota.

On the other hand, only one in four board members in Fortune 100 companies were women in 2018. And FTSE 350 boards will need to appoint women to nearly half of all new available appointments if they’re to achieve the UK government’s target of one-third women by 2020.

More worryingly still, European quotas don’t seem to have increased the number of women in the pipeline: in Germany, France and the Netherlands, women hold just 10-20% of senior management jobs. This suggests that even where the numbers have changed for the better, behaviors and cultures haven’t.

What’s tech got to do with it?
The explosion in digital technologies, including AI, has added another dimension to the gender diversity debate: the notable absence of women in the tech sector.

While the number of women on boards has increased in the last 70 years, female representation in tech has gone the other way. As recently as the 1960s, women made up the biggest part of the workforce in computing; fast forward to 2019 and just 22% of AI professionals globally are female.

This problem starts in school, with girls’ interest in STEM dwindling as they get older. “Girls are discouraged from entering the industry from a young age and it’s harder to captivate them later,” says Sara Conejo Cervantes, an international speaker and campaigner for gender and AI. As a result, only 35% of STEM students in higher education globally are women. And of the women that take up tech jobs, many leave, citing a ‘toxic’ culture that discriminates against them.

All of this can make it difficult to find qualified women for board roles, and organizational cultures can mean internal candidates get overlooked.

In this context, it’s not surprising that women make up just 12.6% of board members in the UK’s top tech firms. Or that only one of the 24 total board members at three leading Chinese tech firms is a woman.