Skills-based hiring has been touted as a path towards more equitable hiring. The Burning Glass Institute in particular has been a strong advocate for using skills as a hiring prerequisite rather than a university degree. Their hope is that this can overcome intergenerational disadvantage, which is awesome.
However I see both a significant risk and opportunity at the intersection of skills-based hiring and gender equity.
My first area of concern is specific to skills inference and gender. It is an unambiguous and undisputed truth that men will claim more skills that women. It inevitably follows that if you are using skills inference tools based on extracting key-words, or claimed skills, to produce target lists then you will pick up a disproportionate number of men. This problem is not easily solved and takes a lot of work to address.
My second big concern, which is also a big area of opportunity, relates to the design of skills taxonomies. For all sorts of structural reasons, skills taxonomies are mostly concerned with the relationship between people and technologies or tasks. They tend to be relatively blind to the aspects of work which concern relationships with others and with the self. You don’t often see Humility in a skills taxonomy for example; or Care for Others. More women than men are strong in these skills, but their absence from most skill ontologies means that they are not captured in digital systems…and probably also uncompensated….which contributes to the gender pay gap.
For organizations that can address these two issues, both correcting the inference error and ensuring they have a more holistic skills taxonomy, then skills-based hiring can drive better gender equity outcomes. Otherwise it may well go the other way.