Increasing focus on AI is driving demand for empathetic women leaders

New-age technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) are disrupting the way people interact with the world and the way businesses function. A paradigm shift is prevalent, which indicates a growing trend among organisations to leverage such technologies to improve business value and generate consumer benefits, and it is clear the future of all businesses and work is AI-driven.

Integration of advanced technologies brings forth myriad opportunities, but comes with its own set of challenges. While AI continues to deliver impact across several areas, from automating marketing strategies to carrying out accurate predictive analysis, a significant shortcoming remains in its ability to understand and share human emotions and exercise empathy, a fundamental human trait. This further highlights the emerging importance of the role of empathy in leadership becoming increasingly indispensable, subsequently creating the demand for empathetic women leaders at the workplace.

Today, organisations have continually increased focus on diversifying the workplace by prioritising efforts in recruiting people with varied backgrounds, education profiles, genders, and abilities. However, the current picture of India Inc reveals that only 1 in 10 women rise to leadership roles, dropping out of the leadership pipeline at mid-to-senior levels as a response to a number of persisting issues posed by ingrained patriarchy and socio-cultural factors. This indicates a problem of inclusion within organisations that needs urgent addressing.

The pandemic has accelerated rigorous technology adoption within organisations, causing a disruption of existing business models, and forcing enterprises to move towards an innovation mindset. But the successful implementation of AI and ML is impeded due to ethical concerns and a lack of trust, along with a debate over data use, governance, and regulatory compliance from a policy and security perspective.

Ensuring inclusion of women leaders will be key for enterprises to leverage AI in pursuits of growth and success. Inclusion as a concept is qualitative, and requires intent and purpose from the very top in an organisation. It is brought about by combining affirmative action and change across company culture and behaviour. A culture that harbours characteristics such as openness, respect, free-flowing discussions and dialogues over successes and failures in a transparent manner, is one that can be defined as inclusive.

A diverse and inclusive work environment further guarantees accountability, being able to hold people to the task. To achieve successful adoption of AI, empathetic women leadership will be critical. Between the hard logic of AI and the softer, nuanced realm of human interaction, empathetic women leadership will act as a bridge, enabling the translation of cold facts and figures into a resonant language of emotions and experiences of the respective teams. Empathy will not only foster an environment of mutual respect and open communication, but will also influence the interactions of a business with its customers, availing an understanding of their needs, fears and desires to allow businesses create more personalised and meaningful experiences.

A persistent challenge that organisations of today across developed and developing economies face is their ability to retain female employees, with female employee attrition rates being significantly high. Several studies have concluded that in order to retain female employees, a positive, encouraging, supportive, and collaborative work environment is a must.

Certain characteristics displayed by women such as higher empathy and cooperation, the ability to approach a problem from a broader perspective while seeing the bigger picture and being more visionary, and communicating in a more encouraging way, make empathetic women leaders more capable of delivering collaborative leadership, which will lead to greater market adoption of AI products through building trust and creating higher value for users and customers.

The diverse applications of AI and ML, such as robotics and chatbots to self-driving cars, have created high demand for such capabilities across industries. Women leaders will play a central role in eliminating biases and humanising the technology. Empathetic women leaders will help build stronger teams as employees feel better understood and valued, while empathy in itself will lead to better decision-making, facilitating innovation via an approach that takes into account multiple perspectives that generate unique solutions. A fusion of empathetic leadership and AI will thus lead to an intertwining of the efficiency and analytic prowess of AI with the empathetic and understanding nature of women leaders, providing crucial insight into employee and customer behaviour that can greatly benefit businesses overall.

With the use of AI, organisations may further be enabled to identify and eradicate certain common barriers faced by women, such as difficulties in being recognised and experiencing mid-career fatigue on account of having to work harder. Addressing the detrimental impacts of preconceived notions such as the belief that women are naturally fit for families, and men for work, will be crucial for organisations.

Women have traditionally struggled with perceptions of credibility and capability, which could be solved with the use of unbiased AI systems within organisational structures. The emerging developments with the increasing prevalence of AI will require more women to leverage opportunities to upskill, re-learn and stay abreast with the latest in the AI domain and stay future-ready. Learning platforms that provide virtual courses and certifications will also be catalysts for advancing careers and enabling women aspirants to qualify for careers in data science and AI. Finally, it will be critical for teams building AI to progress with a conscious approach rooted deeply in empathy and sustainability.

(Divya Jain is the Co-founder of Seekho)