Diversity in tech 2024: Collaboration is vital for DEI progress
At the 2024 Computer Weekly and Harvey Nash diversity in tech event, speakers and audience members alike made it clear that gaining true equity in the technology sector will continue to move at a snail’s pace without working together
The age of artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the IT landscape, but with an ongoing diversity crisis in the tech sector, it remains to be seen whether the rapid development of these technologies will ultimately help or hinder our lives.
Speaking at the annual Computer Weekly and Harvey Nash diversity in tech event, Bev White, CEO of Harvey Nash parent company Nash Squared, highlighted the importance of actively creating opportunities for underrepresented groups to join the technology sector if we want to make the industry a more diverse place.
Lamenting how slowly the dial is shifting when it comes to diversity in technology, White urged those in the sector to be proactive in ensuring the tech workforce reflects tech users.
“It’s on us, all of us – not just the HR community, not just the CIOs, the CDOs and the CEOs – to make a change. It’s on all of us,” she said.
“Every time we think about hiring, or promoting, or encouraging someone to step up and represent a department, we need to think about how we’re doing that and give somebody an opportunity to stand up and shine. We have to do that every single day, in everything we do, or nothing will change.”
With the rapid development of tech such as artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI) and machine learning, this sentiment has never been more important.
A report from Nash Squared found that 75% of workers are already using GenAI in their work. As this figure increases, it will become ever-more important to make sure the people developing these technologies reflect the people using them.
It’s on us, all of us – not just the HR community, not just the CIOs, the CDOs and the CEOs – to make a change
Bev White, Nash Squared
As White pointed out, if the teams developing these tools don’t fully represent those using them, how do we ensure they serve their purpose?
This paints a bleak picture for the future of AI development, where unbalanced teams and a lack of consideration for users have already caused problems.
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should
While AI adoption is increasing rapidly, the development of AI technology is nothing new.
Maria Axente, head of AI public policy and ethics at PwC, said technology development has often hinged on “because we can” without considering “the impact on the users and who needs to be involved in the conversation about design”.
Her role as a tech ethicist has her considering exactly these issues – what purpose technology will serve, who the technology is for, and who should be involved in building it.
She explained: “AI ethics is a discipline concerned with creating a vision of a good life with AI, whatever a good life with AI means.”
Alongside a history of technology being developed with bias, from seatbelts to period trackers, Axente highlighted the women who are fighting to make technologies such as AI ethical, useful and fair.
It can take a lot of time, effort and evidence to convince some of those developing technologies that what they are creating will have a direct impact on people’s lives, and that in some cases this impact will be negative without having the right best practice in place.
Axente said: “We’ve learned gradually that tech is tangibly harming people.”
There are a number of ways the development of AI and machine learning has been biased against women and other underrepresented groups. Beckie Taylor, co-founder of Tech Returners, gave an example of a notable tech company that implemented an AI machine learning model for screening job applicants. Taylor explained how the predominantly male software team that built it led to the software having a bias against female applicants.
Though this problem was identified and amended quickly, this “goes to show the importance of a human in that process”, Taylor said.
“Even though it’s called AI, it’s made by people, it’s built by people, it’s deployed by people, so it matters who those people are, and whether they’re bringing a wide range of experience and perspectives to their work.”
AI is made by people, it’s built by people, it’s deployed by people, so it matters who those people are, and whether they’re bringing a wide range of experience and perspectives to their work
Beckie Taylor, Tech Returners
AI ethicist Axente said: “We owe it to a lot of great women who have been raising their voices, despite the backlash they have received. They help us understand better how this tech perpetuates these existing harms.”
Some of these women have been “bullied”, “fired” and “ignored” during their quest to make sure the development of AI will benefit the majority rather than the few, according to Axente, who said we’re now in a better position to begin changing the mindset around technology development and adoption – away from building it for the sake of it and towards building it purposefully.
An obvious way to ensure algorithms are representative of the wider population is to attract and retain more tech talent from underrepresented groups, but also to make sure those “shaping the future of humanity with AI” reflect the greater population of users who will eventually be forced to integrate AI into their everyday lives – “person-centric AI” should be the focus of the future.
Axente said: “If we want to make AI work for us as individuals and as a collective, collaboration – not competition – is the way forward.”
Working together
While there are around 5% more women using AI technology than there were 10 years ago, there are 10% fewer women working in technology than there were in 1984, according to Jasmin Guthmann, co-vice-president of the MACH Alliance.
This imbalance between the number of women using AI and the number of women developing AI is contributing towards AI bias and tech that isn’t suitable for all of its users – so much so that the government outlined plans in its recent AI opportunities action plan to increase the diversity of the AI and data science talent pool in the UK.
But Guthmann said women are currently “trying to solve it all by themselves, and that isn’t going to cut it”.
The diversity of the tech workforce has been stagnant for some time. The 2024 Diversity report from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT, stated that if current trends continue, it will take another 283 years for the percentage of women working in the UK’s tech sector to match the 48% of women there are in the wider workforce.
But as Guthmann pointed out: “If I try to change it by myself, I’m not going to get anywhere.”
Shifting the dial at a more reasonable pace will take a collective effort, which Guthmann claimed is one of the reasons she didn’t want the MACH offshoot, Women in MACH, to be exclusively about or for women. “There needed to be men in the room,” she said. “We need all of you fantastic allies in the room to help us make it a bigger conversation and to have that conversation on our behalf when we’re not in the room.”
And there are a lot of instances where women and other underrepresented groups aren’t in the room – only 13% of IT directors in the UK are from black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, and women made up only a quarter of CIO positions in FTSE 100 companies in 2023.
All of us need to be involved in any way we can, especially because “underrepresented minorities and women are more often than others hesitant to put themselves forward” for tech roles and opportunities, said Guthmann.
Read more about Computer Weekly’s diversity events
At the 2023 Computer Weekly diversity in tech event, in partnership with Nash Squared, more than 100 experts from the tech and employment sectors shared their ideas for improving diversity in the technology industry.
At the Computer Weekly diversity in tech event in 2022, experts proposed a 15-point plan to improve diversity and inclusion across the industry. The suggestions they made focused on getting people into the sector and keeping them there, especially those currently under-represented in the sector who could solve many of the problems the industry is currently facing.
She made some recommendations for underrepresented individuals and allies to push for small changes that when put together will make a big change. These include putting people forward for opportunities, calling out when there are male-only panels at events, making sure the opinion of quieter people is heard, and inviting male allies to women in tech events.
“Your objective from this day is to be that voice that says is there a better way of doing this,” she said. “People will only do better if we all hold them accountable. How do we redefine the future of tech? Innovation doesn’t happen in silence, it happens when we break boundaries together – so go do one small thing today to make the world a better place tomorrow.”
When disaster strikes
Collaboration can be a powerful tool when used in the right way.
When the government announced plans early last year to raise the income threshold for potential angel investors, Emma Wright, a partner at law firm Harbottle & Lewis, mobilised a large group of women in tech to get the law reversed.
With the new law removing 70% of the women able to provide angel investment, the change threatened the number of businesses led by women in the UK.
“Female founders generate more revenue than their male counterparts,” Wright explained.
“Just 1.7% of venture capital funding goes to female funders, and women back other women more than double than men back women.”
Wright’s background is well suited for a challenge such as this. Having previously headed up government and public sector as a partner at Deloitte Legal, she understands how government works, and as well as her role as a tech and data lawyer, she was one of the founders of the Interparliamentary Forum for Emerging Tech (formerly the Institute of AI).
Wright launched the investHER campaign, releasing an open letter that called on the government to make a decision by the then-upcoming budget. Many of the women who signed the open letter were from Computer Weekly’s list of the Most Influential Women in UK Tech.
As pointed out by Wright, any technology that isn’t built with everyone in mind “acts as a barrier and doesn’t enable”. This is a dangerous precedent to set when it comes to technology such as AI, which looks to be a very large part of everyone’s future.
While this particular inequity was swerved, the efforts of investHER still only managed to get the problematic law reversed, not increase the potential number of female investors and backers for startups led by women.
Wright said: “Unless we’ve got everyone developing the tech solutions, we cannot compete on a global stage, and we will not have inclusive AI.”
A clear example of how technology adoption can have a negative impact if no one considers the end user is the Post Office scandal.
Former subpostmaster Jo Hamilton told the Computer Weekly diversity event she didn’t have any problems running her Post Office branch until the Horizon system was introduced.
Because she didn’t know anything about computers, when errors in her end-of-day accounting occurred on the system she thought she was the one making mistakes, resulting in the Post Office claiming she owed them more and more money due to allegedly unbalanced books – despite the computer being at fault.
The same happened to hundreds of other subpostmasters across the UK. The system came with no training, no support.
“Think of us first, think of people who know nothing about tech and using it. We were just little shopkeepers,” Hamilton said.
She urged those developing technology to “consider the people who are going to use [tech] who are not technologically skilled”.
Incidents like this, and those mentioned previously, will happen more and more if care isn’t taken to ensure AI and other technologies are developed with ethical use cases by diverse teams.
But this, in turn, can only be ensured by working together – from educators to governments, organisations to individuals.
Without everyone involved in the shaping of our future in partnership with AI, not everyone will see the benefit.
