Levelling The Playing Field: Leveraging AI-Driven Recruitment to Mitigate Motherhood Discrimination

Abstract

Motherhood discrimination remains a persistent issue in workplaces worldwide, with women often facing biases, unfair treatment, and limited career opportunities due to their reproductive and caregiving responsibilities. Despite legal protections, working mothers continue to face significant biases and barriers in hiring, promotion, and training. This research explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to mitigate this form of gender bias. The authors establish the relationship between gendered roles and the public-private dichotomy that has fostered the growth of pregnancy and motherhood discrimination in the workplace. The paper further analyses how AI can be leveraged to create a fairer hiring and promotion landscape. It discusses the potential applications of AI in resume screening and job interview analysis. The paper also identifies the potential algorithmic biases associated with the use of AI to mitigate motherhood discrimination and addresses the ethical considerations and potential limitations of using AI for this purpose. The significance of this paper lies in bridging the gap between traditional anti-discrimination strategies and cutting-edge technological interventions to provide new insights and strategies to tackle discriminatory practices against working mothers, which has far-reaching consequences for individuals, organisations, and society as a whole. The findings suggest that while AI holds promise for reducing overt discrimination, significant challenges remain in addressing more subtle biases and ensuring AI systems themselves do not perpetuate existing inequities.