Is AI bias in hiring software keeping women from the workforce?
First, the patriarchy was holding us back. Now, it’s the robots.
I kid, but only slightly. During the pandemic, more than 54M women worldwide left the job force to focus on caregiving responsibilities. Now they may face a new challenge as they start to return: biased artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). And according to a recent study from Harvard Business School professor Joe Fuller and team, 50% of participating CEOs admitted that applications with a career break of 6 months or more are automatically rejected right off the bat. The implication is that many women returning to the workforce right now may never have their resume seen by a human — even when they are excellent candidates.
Blocking qualified women from the workforce
An estimated 99% of Fortune 500 companies use ATS. The promise of ATS is that companies can filter through a large volume of applications across all of their open positions, automatically filtering out candidates who lack the requisite skills and bubbling up the strongest candidates for human review. The promise is that companies are implementing a data-driven hiring process which is less prone to bias. This, unfortunately, is not the case. I wonder how many companies have a blindspot here where their strongly held equity and diversity beliefs are not being supported by their reliance on ATS to screen candidates.
Over 2M American women, and 54M women globally, found themselves having to step away from their careers during the pandemic in order to shoulder increased caregiving needs. Signs indicate that a large number have still not returned. How much of that is by choice, and how many are finding themselves unknowingly shut out of the job market? How many are actively looking for a new role and feeling dejected by an utter lack of response that they cannot explain?
For me, this is personal. After years of building a career as a technology executive, most recently at the Girl Scouts, I’ve spent a year and a half as the primary caregiver for my aging parents, who both experienced health crises soon after the start of the pandemic. I’m also the mother to an elementary-aged boy, so when I wasn’t moving my parents into a nursing home or selling their house or figuring out their Medicaid benefits, or trying to connect with them despite their dementia, I was helping my son navigate online school, among other things.
Now that my parents are in a good place, and he’s back in school, I’m ready to find a new opportunity to do paid work — and it’s demoralizing and frankly infuriating to think that the unpaid work I’ve been doing will keep me from being considered at companies that rely on ATS. When I do talk to actual humans about my pandemic caregiving challenges they get it right away — the robots…not so much.
Career breaks: Normal parts of life, or deal breakers?
Recently Linkedin added a new feature that I’ve talked about previously, which allows people to add career breaks to their Linkedin profile. This is an encouraging indicator that our work culture may be shifting to normalize the human need to step away from paid work at times, whether to care for loved ones, or tend to our own health needs (global mental health crisis, anyone?). But if employers, and their HR technology, are still biased against people who take career breaks, LinkedIn’s move is not going to create the sea change many have hoped for.
Former Verizon CIO and head of Break Through Tech Judith Spitz has written about how algorithmic bias threatens businesses, and offers useful suggestions for leaders looking to mitigate this threat. The algorithms are not neutral, and they are not reflective of the true workplace — nor, it seems, are they primed to help us to create more equal workplaces of the future.
I joked earlier that the robots are holding women back, but of course, if we’re going to blame anyone, it’s the humans behind the robots. We created the technology that is perpetuating inequality, and it’s up to us to fix it — which, of course, is why it’s important to have more women in tech in the first place. We just have to hope they don’t take time off to care for anyone, themselves included, or they could be gone for good.