Technology will widen pay gap and hit women hardest – Davos report- Guardian

Research into jobs finds men’s dominance in IT and biotech is reversing trend towards equality

The gulf between men and women at work – in both pay and status – is likely to widen unless action is taken to tackle inequality in high-growth sectors such as technology, say researchers at this week’s World Economic Forum summit in Davos.

A new WEF report on the future of jobs finds the dominance of men in industries such as information and biotechnology, coupled with the enduring failure of women to rise to the top even in the health and education sectors, is helping to reverse gender equality after years of improvements.

How Robots Could Make the Gender Pay Gap Even Worse - Fortune

A new report published Thursday suggests that robots could make the gender pay gap even worse, stoking existing fears and uncertainty around the concept of automation.

In a paper titled “Managing automation Employment, inequality and ethics in the digital age,” the Institute for Public Policy Research argued that a greater share of jobs that women hold—46.8% versus 40.9% for men—have the technical potential to be automated since female workers are more likely to hold low-skill “automatable” occupations. Paired with women’s underrepresentation in high-skill occupations that may be complemented by technology, that means that automation could exacerbate gender inequality.

“Automation,” IPPR says, “is more likely to accelerate inequalities of wealth and income than create a future of mass joblessness.”

Initially, IPPR says, automation could narrow the gender pay gap since it would displace women from jobs that tend to earn below-average pay. (According to the latest OECD data, the gender wage gap in the U.K. is 17.1%; in the U.S., it’s 18.9%.) But that progress would remain only if displaced women re-entered the labor market at around the new average salary for their gender. That’s unlikely, IPPR says. Some industries dominated by women (such as retail or child and elderly care) are seeing less investment in productivity-raising technology, perhaps because the current human labor is so cheap.

Bots, Gender Gap, Gender Pay Data, Women in EconomyBrigitte BellanJanuary 15, 2018Claire Zillman, Fortune, Automation, Gender Gap

Artificial intelligence could hardwire sexism into our future. Unless we stop it- WEF Blog

In five years’ time, we might travel to the office in driverless cars, let our fridges order groceries for us and have robots in the classroom. Yet, according to the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2017, it will take another 100 years before women and men achieve equality in health, education, economics and politics.

What’s more, it's getting worse for economic parity: it will take a staggering 217 years to close the gender gap in the workplace.

How can it be that the world is making great leaps forward in so many areas, especially technology, yet it's falling backwards when it comes to gender equality?

Bias, AI, Biased decisions, Data, Gender Equality, Gender Gap, Women in Tech, Women in the WorkplaceBrigitte BellanDecember 16, 2017Alison Kay, EY, WEF

Working for the algorithm Machines will help employers overcome bias - The Economist

Who is best placed to judge a firm’s workers? In 2018 employees everywhere will increasingly feel the effects of the rise of “talent analytics”, also known as “people analytics”, as they go about their daily work. Having been relatively slow compared with other corporate departments in making use of big data, in 2018 human-resources (HR) folk will become its most enthusiastic proponents—with significant implications for who gets hired, what they are paid and whether they are promoted. Employees will have to get used to being (often unwitting) guinea pigs in frequent HR experiments. And wise ones will think ever more carefully about how they express themselves in e-mails and on digital collaborative-working platforms such as Slack.

One reason is the pressure HR executives will face to make workplaces better for women and minority groups. The limitations of established approaches, such as training and awareness programmes, had caused “diversity fatigue” to set in. But it has become a corporate priority again after shocking headlines in 2017 about sexual discrimination and harassment in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, professional sports and big media firms, which reminded the world that bad corporate culture is a serious business risk.

Garbage in. Garbage Out. - NEVERTHELESS

One afternoon in Florida in 2014,18-year Brisha Borden was running to pick up her god-sister from school when she spotted an unlocked kid’s bicycle and a silver scooter. Brisha and a friend grabbed the bike and scooter and tried to ride them down the street. Just as the 18-year-old girls were realizing they were too big for the toys, a woman came running after them saying, “That’s my kid’s stuff.” They immediately dropped the stuff and walked away. But it was too late — a neighbor who witnessed the event had already called the police. Brisha and her friend were arrested and charged with burglary and petty theft for the items, valued at a total of $80.

The previous summer, 41-year-old Vernon Prater was picked up for shoplifting $86.35 worth of tools from a nearby Home Depot store. He had already been convicted of several armed robbery charges and had served 5 years in prison. Borden, the 18 year old, had a record too — but for juvenile misdemeanors.

For the the full transcript and podcast:

https://medium.com/nevertheless-podcast/transcript-garbage-in-garbage-out-78b74b08f16e

The key to closing the gender gap? Putting more women in charge - WEF

While women worldwide are closing the gap in critical areas such as health and education, significant gender inequality persists in the workforce and in politics. Given current rates of change, this year’s Global Gender Gap Reportestimates it will be another 217 years before we achieve gender parity.

As part of its workforce gap analysis, the World Economic Forum turned to LinkedIn to better understand the trends in gender equality across the workforce. Thanks to our unique insight into real-time workforce trends, LinkedIn can provide more depth, nuance, and timeliness than the sort of data historically gathered by governments or NGOs. Our data provides insight into the role women leaders play in driving overall economic equity and participation.

Women will wait 217 years for pay gap to close, WEF says - The Guardian

Gender parity ‘shifting into reverse’ as World Economic Forum adds 47 years to time needed to reach workplace equality.

The authors of a new report forecasting that it could take 170 years to eradicate the disparity in pay and employment opportunities for men and women have called for urgent action to close the gender equality gap.

The report by the World Economic Forum – best known for its high-profile gathering each year in Davos, Switzerland – found that economic disparity between women and men around the world was rising even though the gap was closing on other measures, such as education.

Can we talk about the gender pay gap? By Xaquín G.V., Washington Post

The median salary for women working full-time is about 80 percent of men’s. That gap, put in other terms, means women are working for free 10 weeks a year.

... you started working for free 15 hours ago

Well, that is a little blunt — there are gradients on that difference. The pay gap varies depending on the occupation, working hours, education attainment, experience, and geography.

Start-Ups Use Technology to Redesign the Hiring Process - NY Times

Iris Bohnet, a behavioral economist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, spoke to the founders of two behavioral design start-ups, Kate Glazebrook of Applied and Frida Polli of Pymetrics, for the latest on the algorithmic design revolution that is transforming hiring practices.

Here's why gender equality is taking so long - World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum estimates gender parity globally may now be over 170 years away. Previously they estimated an 80-year time, then it was 120 years. It keeps slowing down. The Forum's Annual Gender Gap Report shows slow progress and minimal change in many countries worldwide. What is causing this glacial pace of change, something the airline industry calls a “creeping delay”?

There are many headwinds that can lengthen the time required for desired systemic change, but there is one I’d like to address here, head on, and it’s this: unconscious bias.

In general, there is a lack of awareness about who others are and what their capabilities and inherent qualities may be. In corporations, this often manifests as a culture that is unfriendly or unhelpful to women.

Bias, Gender Gap, Gender EqualityBrigitte BellanOctober 7, 2017World Economic Forum

Words ascribed to female economists: 'Hotter,' 'feminazi.' Men?: 'Goals,' 'Nobel.' - The Washington Post

In 1970, the economics department at the University of California at Berkeley hired three newly minted economics PhDs from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Two - both men - were hired as assistant professors. But a woman, Myra Strober, was hired as a lecturer, a position of inferior pay and status and no possibility of tenure. When she asked the department chairman why she was denied an assistant professorship, he put her off with excuses. She kept pressing him until he gave a frank answer: She had two young children; the department couldn't possibly put her on the tenure track.

So Strober took another offer. In 1972, she became the first female economist at Stanford's Graduate School of Business. "They didn't know what to make of me," she said. The faculty retreat, which had been held every year at a men's club, had to be moved. There were jokes about putting a bag over her head so they could keep going to the club.

"It was like trying to run a race with one of your legs tied behind you," Strober said of the culture.

Why we desperately need women to design AI - Medium

At the moment, only about 12–15% of the engineers who are building the internet and its software are women.

Here are a couple examples that illustrate why this is such a big a problem:

Do you remember when Apple released it’s health app a few years ago? Its purpose was to offer a ‘comprehensive’ access point to health information and data. But it left out a large health issue that almost all women deal with, and then took a year to fix that hole.
Then there was that frustrated middle school-aged girl who enjoyed gaming, but couldn’t find an avatar she related to. So she analyzed 50 popular games and found that 98% of them had male avatars (mostly free!), and only 46% of them had female avatars (mostly available for a charge!). Even more askew when you consider that almost half of gamers are women.

We don’t want a repeat of these kinds of situations. And we’ve been working to address this at Women 2.0 for over a decade. We think a lot about how diversity — or lack thereof. We think about it has affected — and is going to affect — the technology outputs that enter our lives. These technologoies engage with us. The determine our behaviors, thought processes, buying patterns, world views… you name it. This is part of the reason we recently launched Lane, a recruitment platform for female technologists.

The Global Search for Education: How Are We Doing On The Gender Agenda? – Millennials Weigh In

Posted By C. M. Rubin on Jul 27, 2017

In an interview with CMRubinWorld, Dr. Linda Scott, Emeritus DP World Chair for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Said Business School, University of Oxford, reminds us that the gender gap is everywhere, “real and measurable” and not a “figment of some feminist’s imagination.” The global research confirms that gender inequality “retards economic growth, perpetuates poverty,” and “is bad for families.”