FIVE TECH PREDICTIONS FOR 2021 — AND HOW THEY’LL IMPACT GENDER BALANCE

With an unprecedented year behind us, we’re looking forward to the innovations and thought leadership that will drive progress forward in the coming years. Here are our five predictions for tech trends that will continue to advance women in 2021.



Businesses return to diversity as a priority

At the beginning of 2020 women still only made up 17 per cent of IT workers, a number largely stagnant in the past decade according to WISE, the campaign for gender balance in science and engineering. ‘Technology roles account for 25 per cent of core STEM roles and offer some of the most exciting careers, yet companies are failing to attract and retain women,’ said WISE chief executive Helen Wollaston. And for those it does attract, the pressures of 2020 were damaging — a report by Tech Radius1 revealed that while five per cent of male tech professionals were laid off due to the pandemic, females constituted eight per cent of the industry layoffs. In 2021 though, many predict we can expect to see businesses making up for lost time, and indeed, vocal commitments to invest in diversity were made at the end of 2020 from Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Intel, setting the bar for others to follow. Microsoft will add $150m to its diversity and inclusion investments while Facebook has committed to 30 per cent more people of colour in leadership positions and to continue its efforts to increase the representation of women in leadership. Elsewhere, industry-wide initiatives such as the Tech Talent Charter (TTC) are also gathering steam to power change, having attracted pledges from 503 businesses to drive inclusivity and diversity in tech, and aiming to get to 600 Signatories in 2021.

 

Women key to scaling up AI and data science

Machine learning and data science are some of the fastest growing professions in the UK and the US, and as our ability to collect and analyse data improves, demand for talent will continue to increase. But this robust demand still belies the fact that women occupy only a minority of tech positions in comparison to men. For AI and data this under-representation presents a serious impediment to the development and maturation of these technologies, something that will continue to be a focus in 2021. Women are increasingly recognised as the key to scaling up AI effectively, with research showing that their ability to excel in areas of emotional intelligence, leadership skills and creativity. In addition, widening the pool of women in AI and data roles is essential to ensure that the gender biases already documented in some machine learning algorithms2 do not become a new type of female exclusion in society. Under-represented groups need to be equal partners in developing algorithms, setting research agendas and building the applications to ensure that selection bias does not creep in. Those seeking to help redress gender inequity include the Alan Turing Institute3, which is setting up the women in data science and AI research project in 2021 to help increase understanding of the issue. The project’s mission statement is clear. ’Increasing women’s participation is the only way to ensure that their perspectives and priorities will inform the insights that this new field will generate, and the uses to which it is put in society.’

 

Female start-ups attract more funding

According to research by KPMG, venture capital investment in UK start and scale-ups surged through 2019 hitting more than £9 billion, with fintech, health, AI and biotech and ecommerce as hot areas of growth. Investment in Europe fell 12 per cent through the pandemic but is expected to pick up again as life gets back on track. But while investment may be surging, female founders still garner just one per cent of the total capital invested in Europe’s venture-backed start-ups. The female funding gap has long hampered innovation and growth in the talent pool, with women-led funds and incubators such as the Female Founders Fund, as well as government initiatives on the rise in recent years to try and close it. A recent report by Women in VC focused on the need for female fund managers in particular to make effective gains in this area. Research has shown that female funders are twice as likely to invest in start-ups with a female founder, and more than three times likely with a female CEO4 . Amplification of these choices would have significant effects on the products and services brought to market. Furthermore, the business case for increased investment in women is clear: Goldman Sachs’ latest report showed that in 496 US equity funds, women managers outperformed male funds across the board. And according to a Harvard Business Review study, VC firms that increased the number of female partners by 10 per cent experienced a 1.5 per cent increase in fund returns each year.

 

Women will create new realities

The mainstream trend toward digitally extended realities, encompassing virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality (MR) continued to gather momentum in 2020, and 2021 should see even greater uptake and innovation. ‘ With these new realities finding application in areas such as networking, brand customer experience, improved data visualisation and entertainment, the market is booming. Nesta reported last year5 that there are around 1,000 immersive specialist companies in the UK employing 4,500 people and representing nine per cent of the global market share. Women as consumers still lag behind men in use of this tech – according to a report by EY, two thirds of women said they were unlikely to try either VR or AR, compared with half of men — but unusually VR bucks the gender gap trend in tech and gaming, with female-led input notably better represented than in other areas of the industry. A 2017 survey of 70 international VR and AR companies showed that 64.3 per cent were led by women, something possibly explained by the demand for talent from all entertainment areas and technologies needed to advance VR. In purely technical terms, women are also increasing their impact — the creation of Oculus’ latest high-profile VR innovation the Oculus Quest was led by Ana Garcia Puyol, AR/VR Product Design Lead at Oculus/Facebook — other big hitters include Timoni West, XR Product Director at Unity Technologies, leading advanced product development for spatial computing tools in AR, VR and MR.

 

Gender bias will be challenged in biometrics

Facial recognition technology continues to be a hot topic; with a wide range of potential uses — from phone access, passport control and even identifying people’s true emotions. The tech also accelerated in 2020 in areas such as access control that allowed companies to take employee temperatures on entry with facial recognition. Industry leaders include Mei Bagan of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, winner of the 2020 Women in Biometrics Awards, and Dr Poppy Crum, chief scientist at Dolby Laboratories, whose work uses AI to allow computers to detect users’ emotional signals and ‘create more compassionate machines’. But biometric tech faces deep ethical concerns. AI programs learn by identifying correlations between individual components in a data set — as such they can only recreate reality and therefore existing systemic bias if developers aren’t careful, including gender stereotypes.

‘Identity is one of the hottest topics in cybersecurity right now,’ says Anna Delaney, Director of Production at Information Security Media Group. ‘Biometrics, such as fingerprints and facial recognition have been increasingly used as a means of authenticating people. The algorithms used for facial recognition can replicate gender and racial bias and inequalities, so we should demand transparency from technologists, governments and regulators about how this technology is being made to ensure it serves humanity.’

Big tech is taking moves to course correct — Google’s decision in 2020 to no longer identify people by gender in its image recognition AI was a high-profile example. And solutions such as Generative Adversarial Networks— computer-generated faces made from a composite of photos of real people — to train facial recognition algorithms out of bias — are gaining traction.

But 2021 will continue to underscore the need for vigilance and oversight to ensure that this future tech is serving society and helping existing bias to be eradicated — rather than allowing it to creep into the system again through the back door of ‘progress’.