AI That Advances Gender Equity, From Parental Leave To Workplace Culture

There is plenty of talk about how AI will steal our jobs and threaten the economy . While the topic of regulating AI is essential and important, it could be argued that AI in its current form isn't inherently good or bad. Rather, it is a technology or tool that humans can leverage in ways that cause harm or, on the flip side, can benefit society. For inspiration, here are three different platforms using AI to help advance gender equity.

Changing Toxic Workplace Culture: LOV Where You Work AI Tool

The co-founders of Lift Our Voices (LOV), an organization with the mission to change toxic workplace cultures, are no strangers to the real-world impact of silencing mechanisms in the workplace. The co-founders are Gretchen Carlson and Julie Roginsky, two women who are among the most early and most prominent voices in the #MeToo movement . A decade ago, Carlson filed a lawsuit against Fox News then-chairman CEO Roger Ailes—the most powerful man in media at the time—and roughly 10 months later Roginsky also filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment and retaliation against the Fox News Channel.

Carlson, for example, still can't talk about what happened to her at the news company because she signed an employment agreement with a restrictive NDA. This may not be uncommon: Research done by LOV in partnership with Penn State found that 45% of workers are bound by NDAs and 39% by forced arbitration.

"Many people just sign their contracts without thinking about anything [like NDAs], because it's become boilerplate in the way of the world," says Carlson. "People may think an NDA is just for trade secrets, which we agree with. Companies should be able to do that. But many NDAs are so much more expansive that you might be signing away your voice on the first day of work, before you've actually worked for one minute. Anything that could happen to you from that point forward is now secret. The main thing is making people aware, because our studies and research have shown that the vast majority of American workers have no idea what these clauses are."

To help solve this, Roginsky and Carlson created the LOV Where You Work AI Tool , a free, anonymous, multilingual tool that lets workers anonymously upload employment contracts and identify hidden silencing mechanisms like NDAs and forced arbitration clauses. "The AI tool is multifaceted, and we think it's a game changer for educating workers across the board," says Roginsky.

LOV Where You Work does not offer legal advice. Rather, in addition to helping workers understand the fine print before signing a contract, the tool also arms people with action items to help them ask the right questions, educates about laws in their state, and encourages peer-to-peer networks to increase transparency in the workplace, as there is power in numbers.

"We feel really good about the fact that we can [use AI to] help millions of American workers get more information about their jobs, [rather than] taking them away," says Carlson.

Helping People Take Parental Leave: PaidLeave.AI

Studies show that parental leave benefits both parents and employers in terms of employee wellbeing, engagement, and acquisition, according to Maven . Yet only two in five parents who are eligible for paid family leave use it, and 60% of those who don't take advantage of their parental leave were not aware those benefits existed for them, finds a report from MomsFirst in partnership with McKinsey & Co. This amounted to leaving on the table $6,000 to $10,000 per parent who did not use their leave.

To tackle this issue, MomsFirst founder Reshma Saujani created PaidLeave.a i, a free chatbot that lets people better understand the paid leave options in their state, eligibility requirements, the documentation they'll need, what to do if your leave request is denied, how to calculate your benefits, and more.

"Here's the thing about paid leave: it only closes the gender gap if everyone actually takes it ," says Saujani. "Three in five eligible parents don't take it because they either don't know about it or it's too difficult to access. That's not a policy problem, that's a customer service problem. And AI is really good at solving customer service problems, at scale, in any language. I don't want this to be a chatbot people use once and forget. I want it to be the spark for a whole movement of parents who know what they're owed, go get it, and fight for even more support."

Supporting Domestic Workers And The Care Workforce: Ask Aya

There are 21 million people working in the most underpaid, undervalued jobs in our country — and nearly two-thirds of these workers are women, according to a report from the National Women's Law Center . Domestic workers fall into the low-paid and vulnerable group of workers. Domestic workers are the workers who work inside of our home, such as nannies, homecare workers, and cleaners.

"They do the work that essentially makes it possible for working parents and working family caregivers to go out and do what they do in the world, but it's almost by definition quite isolated and hidden," says Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and president at National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). "There is a long history of exclusion from basic rights and protections that most of us take for granted when we go to work."

Due to the fact that this care work, such as taking care of children or older adults or people with disabilities or household cleaning, is done inside private homes, there aren't many federal protections, enforcement is minimal, and many workers lack access to co-workers or HR support.

Ask Aya is the NDWA's worker-centered AI tool, created with and for domestic workers. It offers real-time, multilingual support for domestic workers at the same time it supports worker organizing, such as by helping workers negotiate pay, set boundaries, document agreements, understand their rights, and find upcoming events in their community or online. As for the name, Aya means nanny in Spanish. Poo says they chose it because it's the kind of name that sounds like it could be from a lot of different cultures.

Ask Aya seems to be effective: One in four workers negotiated better compensation and 93% of users applied Aya's advice in real work conversations, according to the NDWA's beta test .

Taking care of domestic workers is also good for families, workplaces, and the economy. "We often call it 'triple dignity jobs,' because when you make a domestic worker job a good job [where she is paid fairly and treated with dignity], it not only helps her take care of herself and her own family, but it supports the dignity of the child she is nurturing or older person whose quality of life she is supporting," says Poo. "Then it's enabling the dignity of the working caregiver to go out there and contribute, stay in the workforce, and build their careers. There is this ripple effect that is helping to power the economy in an invisible way. When we strengthen the foundation of care workers, it helps strengthen the foundation of our economy."

This article was originally published on Forbes.com