The pre-existing tech biases establish a feeling of uncertainty amongst employees, rendering them to be less enthusiastic towards organizations.

A few years back, #BlackTechTwitter, a popularised Hashtag by Pariss Athena, disclosed the grim reality inside the tech industry’s four walls. Though it was not advertised to the level of #Blacklivesmatter, the idea was similar to address the social bias perpetrating in the tech world. Ironically, the tech world, which is believed to have leaped forward many centuries, making advancements for human society, is falling short to mitigate society’s ingrained biases. Despite the stringent measures taken by the tech leaders, no effective solution has been ruled out that can would mitigate such social mishaps.

The techies’ witness gender and racial biases on an everyday basis. With skepticism already looming towards AI technology’s biases, it becomes imperative that the tech world’s biases must be addressed. There have been countless incidents where the loophole in the existing technology was visible. For example, the failure of facial recognition technique for identifying black people, or voice recognition fails to identify female voices instead of males.

At the organizational level, the companies like Google’s image search for the CEOs, only 11 percent of the women were displayed as the top images of Women CEO. Moreover, reports suggest that only 10% of the women from the total employee chain in big techs like Google and Microsoft.

In this article, we will observe the steps that can be taken to mitigate the biases in the Tech world.

Building Diversified Culture

For any organization to flourish, it becomes paramount that the organization has a diversified population of gender, race, and religion to circulate different ideas in the organization. This approach will help in analyzing and addressing loopholes, which were earlier not possible. Diversified work culture also engages the employees to be diligent while giving their services and creating a strong relationship between them and management.

Moreover,  with diversified work culture, the clients’ trust with the organization also increases.

Committee for accessing the Tech Biases

Paris Athena, whom we talked about earlier, mentioned in a podcast that she was unable to report the racial bias she faced, as she signed a non-disclosure agreement with the tech company. She is not alone in facing such a challenge with racial biases. Due to an NDA, it has been observed that the employees become wary of telling their plight to the employer.

By organizing and forming a committee, to access and observe employees’ biases daily would help in chalking down a strategy that can mitigate such biases. It would also create awareness amongst employees about corporate diversification, and the incidents of harassment due to gender bias and racial bias will also be mitigated.

For example, forming a committee that will observe the number of black people hired or women hired would help promote organizational diversification.

Leveraging AI to promote Diversity

The techniques of Artificial Intelligence can also be leveraged for mitigating the biases in an organizational setup. For example, deploying virtual assistants in the avatars of women, LGBTQ, or black people, would help acknowledge their contribution to technology.

Similarly, by running the female voice in the voice recognition algorithm, it would help mitigate gender biases.  By deploying the facial recognition algorithm with black people’s images would help mitigate racial biases.