AI photo check exposes scale of diversity problem at top firms

Bias in boardrooms is tricky to assess. Many companies don't publish diversity reports, making useful information difficult to come by and hampering efforts to tackle institutional biases. Now artificially intelligent algorithms have been used to dig down into the data, confirming that there is a lack of diversity at the top of the world's corporate ladder. To evaluate the situation, researchers from biotech firm Insilico Medicine compiled pictures of the top executives taken from the websites of nearly 500 of the largest companies in the world. The final dataset comprised over 7200 photographs from companies spanning 38 countries. They trained image recognition algorithms to automatically detect the age, race and sex of the board members, and compared the results to the age, race and gender profile of each firm's country to see if they reflected the general population.