This article has been written by Monika Malik Shahrawat pursuing a Training program on Using AI for Business Growth from SkillArbitrage.

This article has been edited and published by Shashwat Kaushik.

Introduction 

We are living in an ever-changing world now, especially after COVID-19’s everlasting imprint on everyone’s lives. It challenged human lives at almost all of the segments and henceforth led us to many thresholds when it came to our survival. Technology has always proved itself to be an effective boon to us humans through time and again in many different roles and avatars.

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One such effective collaboration of humans and technology, already known as artificial intelligence, prominently cemented its foot in our day-to-day lives during this period. Being physically present everywhere was challenged at the cost of human life, which had already been fighting at every point of its meaning. 

Thereby increasing its significance to revolutionise almost all industries, backed up by various research and analyses done by many economists and strategists within the period of two to three years only. With changing times and scenarios of a shift in work culture and workforce, its impact can be seen as aggressive as well as assisting, depending on where you are sitting and looking. As the developing era we are a part of, its impact is huge, especially for women and their diverse roles. Since globally we are more connected in today’s time than being far, meaning distant. Let’s delve into all these aspects further in the article.

AI and it’s future

In layman’s language, we all can understand that artificial intelligence (AI) has digitised our worlds as it is powerful enough to simulate human intelligence with the assistance of computer systems, involving vast amounts of training and analysing data around numerous correlations and patterns leading to innumerable future predicaments. It has sorted human work in terms of complexity and increased work efficiency by effectively delivering cost and time-cutting results regardless of the industry or segment in which it has been applied. AI can perform tasks better than humans, which has already been seen in businesses when it comes to fraud detection, customer service, quality control, lead generation, etc. Even though it is already part of the day today to live with smartphones in everyone’s hands, SIRI and Google Assistant are the results of AI, along with many other media-related applications on our phones, working as our virtual assistants only with the help of its numerous tools.

AI can feel intimidating to human skills as it has outgrown its aspect of a machine’s understanding through the collection and understanding of a variety of data over the years. It is going to revolutionise the working scenarios in the banking, medical, teaching, and transportation sectors wherever the requirement for soft skills is less. At the same time, it presents a vast scope for new technologies and tools that can aid and assist human work in unimaginable aspects. As the growing trends in the market require demand:

  • Automation of repeated tasks and patterns, which have already been taken over by the AI and its tool.
  • Efficient use of human time and skills with the assistance of AI.
  • Deriving the need, space, and time for soft skills since rest can be taken care of with AI.
  • It has increased the scope for workspace and location, and with its help, providing a remote service with minimum human supervision has widened the doors for job opportunities as well. 
  • Remote working can be considered a developing sector, especially after the increasing significance and assistance of AI, as it has considerably reduced the physical human requirement at any desk job.

So we can consider that it’s safe to say that it has affected all segments of working professionals in both better and bitter ways. One can wonder about its level of impact on any one segment, particularly.

Trends and predictions for women professionals

The current era is very vast or we can consider it a world with invisible boundaries when we consider the availability of marvellous technologies at human’s disposal. With what name and in which time zone you are sitting hardly matters now, especially when we all have lived through the lockdowns of the COVID-19 period. Which has changed the organisational work culture around us all.

According to an article published by CHCI (Centre for Human Capital Innovation) mentioning Hofstede’s culture dimensional model, our diverse cultures are more interconnected now than ever before, which has to be properly understood and taken into consideration. So that actual global potential can be utilised at its true potential. 

For a better understanding of Hofstede’s model, we can refer to the picture below:

This works on all these aspects for any organisation to function in a balanced environment for the collective growth of all under a diverse umbrella of uniformity on a universal platform based upon a thorough understanding of the whole working scenario. It is a significant way of enhancing a remote working scenario, not just theoretically but as a practical tool with the actual layout for the improved working scenario. 

Therefore, AI, with its aid and guidance from such effective models, becomes a very promising mechanism for remote work culture, making it easy for diverse and distant cultures, genders, races, and ethnicities to easily work together.

Scope for women professionals at remote job opportunities

I would like to quote Diane Mariechild here “ A woman is full circle. Within her is the power to create, nurture, and transform.” I not only agree but also take inspiration  from this. A woman is indeed one of the magnificent creations of God, created to do and achieve anything she sets her will to. A professional woman who wants to live and achieve through all of the segments of her life can never have a routine or monotonous life. She is meant to go through it from phase to phase many times owing to her various roles and responsibilities, but that doesn’t mean she can’t have her freedom, work-life balance, self-growth, and development, along with a dash of happiness as well. 

When an ambitious and nurturing woman wants to have such a life, remote work options prove themselves to be the best resort. Though the concept of remote work options knocked at our doors even before the pandemic the way the pandemic hurt all the professionals, this work culture has now proven it as a boon, especially for women professionals who were the worst affected ones during the pandemic. Women with children were more affected than any other strata.                                                                                                                                 A remote work culture provides women with a chance to have an inclusive approach to their professional roles and personal responsibilities as well. In remote work, trends are set to lay a path for competent analysis of work efficiency depending upon factors like hours spent and quality of work, irrespective of the time and location, with the assistance of proficient tools like AI. Remote work options do give a professional the freedom to choose the hours of day or night they want to utilise for the completion of their work, which ultimately decreases the amount of time, energy, and resources spent commuting and being at a physical office. Thus, the resources spared can be used for skill enhancement, personal growth, and better work-life balance. These trends make remote work culture more desirable for any professional, and most importantly for women. This can already be seen in a survey done by LinkedIn, showing a clear inclination of women professionals for this

                                                                          This chart clearly shows that the inclination of women employees is at least 4-5% higher in remote job applications than men. As quoted by copy editor Anita Coryell at LinkedIn, “We need flexibility in this complicated world,” and being in a remote job profile “allows men and women to stay in the workforce and still parent effectively.”  

But it does come with its challenges and demands, which can further be understood by many surveys and theories being applied by several agencies, as https://journals.aom.org/doi/abs/10.5465/annals.2020.0384?journalCode=annal

  •   One such observation emphasises the positive effects of growing virtuality at the workplace, which gives space for enhanced gender equality.
  • Another observation suggests that it does enable opportunities for women but simultaneously inhibits their success as well. In comparison, the gender-based social significance of a woman is different from that of a man.
  •  It provides career-enhancing opportunities but at the same time, these decreasing boundaries of work and personal space can be career damaging thereby undermining the capabilities of women professionals.
  • Remote work options give a chance to create and work with a more diverse workforce, promoting diversity, inclusiveness, and belongingness at a global level from the comfort of one’s personal space.
  • Another aspect of remote work is that it is more effective for women to have some sort of care-providing support system in their comfort zone when managing personal family responsibilities, because a lack of such a system can become even more challenging if they are required to give much more time or attention to their roles at their remote job opportunity. 
  • Also, when working remotely and video conferencing becomes an everyday tool for interacting, it automatically gives your icon space an equal right to be heard or speak up as it gives to anyone else present, irrespective of your gender, race, and geographical location.
  •  Since now not only job opportunities but also learning are available online, it gives more space and chance for women to upskill themselves and learn more since now they are more in their comfort zone, so learning and working both can happen even when a new mother is nurturing and soothing her infant, which in an office work scenario would have been a tough choice of choosing only one.
  • Reference from a study done by Zapier reveals that 62% of women, as opposed to 53% of men, would value organisations giving remote work opportunities more, as many surveys even suggested that many female professionals found themselves more productive in remote work projects.

Conlusion

When so much has been said and done with our industries and workplace continuously evolving with time and technologies, tools like AI come to the rescue for all the working professionals. But when we are talking about the female workforce, I think AI can set the ground for level playing where remote work options spare the time and resources that can be efficiently utilised for equipping oneself with new technologies, knowledge, and tools like AI itself. It does possess many unknown threats regarding how and when but it mostly acts for the improvement of our industries and their workforce, especially in remote work scenarios where for any small-scale industry or a new entrepreneur, it can single-handedly provide virtual administrative assistance along with many such non-soft skills related tasks. Not only this but the same can be done by providing a much-needed skill job for someone sitting very far away but in dire need of a job. We understand that artificial intelligence is not human intelligence but derived from it having negligible emotional understanding; thus, I must emphasise that it can’t seriously extinct the job opportunities as feared by the masses, but it is going to push us humans to learn more, derive more and enhance the dual work synchronisation of a computer and human, leading us all to a more advanced and evasive future of technology and overall human development.

References

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