You need a deliberate strategy to achieve your objectives; you can’t leave things to chance. If you do, you’ll fail.
Three ways boards can use AI to attract and advance women
1. Within the board
- Define your culture and purpose. What kind of company do you want to be? What sort of people and skills will help you achieve it?
- Look at your current expertise. Do you have a special committee or board advisor that helps to inform your governance of AI and its impacts on the organization and beyond? Consider filling gaps by creating new committees that have potential places for women. Reconsider the roles on your board to make sure you have the diverse talent to deliver the company’s strategy. Look for talent in unusual places, too: consider female CEOs of private tech companies for non-exec positions, for example. And consider asking external partners to help you on this journey.
- Develop a clear strategy for AI. What role will technologies play in helping you to achieve your business and cultural objectives? Who ‘owns’ data/digital in your organization? How will you make sure there’s no bias in your AI systems – either customer-facing or internal? Have you embedded the right checks and balances for trust, ethics, transparency and explainability into your AI strategy? And how will you shift the focus from managing risk to maintaining trust?
- Work out what you need to know from management, and decide how AI can support this reporting and decision-making process.
2. From the board to the organization
- How are you making sure your leadership teams treat your culture as a strategic asset? What talent-related metrics are they presenting to the board, and how often?
- What questions should you ask management to make sure they focus on the issues they need to solve, and don’t get carried away with the tech?
- Encourage your leadership team to work with executive search organizations to think more creatively about where talent might be, and what strengths make for a good team.
- Help them to recognize that a degree in a STEM subject isn’t the only route to a leadership role in tech. Upskilling women at graduate to middle management level will also help to fill any gaps in the pipeline.
3. From the organization to the outside world
- Consider how your use of AI could be influencing how women perceive you as an employer. Do people trust your brand?
- Set up a taskforce with other organizations in your sector to encourage early education and develop a balanced pipeline for STEM. As Jeff Wong, EY Global Chief Innovation Officer, said in a recent blog, “Leveling the STEM playing field starts in the classroom – not the boardroom.”
- Run your own outreach/CSR programs in schools and universities.
- Report on efforts to level the playing field, even if you’re not legally obliged to. Being transparent will build trust.
The lasting impact of a positive legacy
These ideas should help you put strategies and processes in place to solve the gender imbalance on your board and below. But what if fellow members of the board or management team have yet to buy into your approach?
“A helpful way to view it can be in terms of legacy, or the kind of organization you want to leave behind,” says Sharon Sutherland. “If that legacy can be positive – in this case, a better gender balance at every level – you’ll be helping to deliver long-term value for your organization. And no one can argue with that.”
Join the conversation #SheBelongs. Let’s progress #WomenFastForward.
We would like to thank Sven Petersen, Partner, Egon Zehnder and Sara Conejo Cervantes, International speaker and campaigner for gender in AI and Board member, InspiredMinds, for sharing their views with us.
For more insights on board matters, visit ey.com/boardmatters. For information on our Women. Fast forward program, visit ey.com/womenfastforward.
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Summary
Organizations are struggling to achieve gender-balanced boards. As the participants in our recent podcast How can more women become architects of the digital world? discussed, AI could be part of the solution – helping organizations to level the playing field. But, that's not enough to drive culture change.