Imagine a world where over 50% of women could see their jobs transformed by artificial intelligence in the next decade, while men face far less disruption (AI poses a bigger threat to women’s work than men’s, ILO report, 2025). This statistic highlights the urgent need to address gender disparities in AI. Women can not only meet this challenge but also thrive and innovate in this rapidly evolving field.
Artificial intelligence is no longer a futuristic concept—it is a mainstream force reshaping the way we work, communicate, and care for ourselves. In high-income countries, especially, AI has already begun to automate clerical and administrative tasks. A report from the International Labour Organization warned that jobs traditionally done by women are more than twice as likely to be transformed by AI compared with jobs traditionally done by men (ILO 2025).
Generative AI, chatbots, and smart tools can offer flexibility and new opportunities, but without a gender lens, they can also widen existing gaps. This article examines the intricate relationship between AI and women, highlighting where gender bias in AI exists, how AI can empower women in the workplace, and the necessary steps to close the AI gender gap.
The Promise of AI in the Workplace
In its best form, AI in the workplace is a liberating force. Generative tools can draft reports, schedule meetings, and analyse data, giving employees—particularly women balancing multiple roles—more time for creativity and strategic thinking. The female workforce and artificial intelligence are natural allies when AI is deployed to lighten workloads, support flexible working, and provide personalised learning. For entrepreneurs, AI chatbots and analytics dashboards offer affordable ways to scale up businesses and reach new markets.
Indeed, micro-trend reports from the Global Wellness Institute highlight an explosion of AI-driven innovations—mental-health chatbots providing 24/7 support, smart wellness platforms that monitor burnout, and personalised fitness programmes that adjust in real time (Global Wellness Institute, 2025). These developments hint at AI opportunities for women to use technology for self-care, wellness, and community building.
When Automation Hits Women Harder
The flip side is that AI job automation threatens to disrupt women’s careers disproportionately. The ILO report found that 9.6% of traditionally female roles are likely to be transformed by AI, compared with just 3.5% of male-dominated roles (ILO 2025). Roles in secretarial work, customer service, and data entry—areas where women are over-represented—are among the first to be automated. Human involvement will still be needed, but tasks may be radically redesigned, demanding new technical skills. Without targeted support, this could entrench an AI inequality where women are more likely to be displaced from routine tasks while men advance into higher-paid technical roles.
Understanding how AI affects women’s jobs is therefore critical: automation must come with retraining programmes and new pathways, not pink slips.
Adoption and Representation Gaps
Beyond job exposure, women lag behind men in using AI tools. Research presented at the World Economic Forum shows that 59% of men aged 18–65 use generative AI at least once a week, compared with 51% of women (WEF, 2024). Among Gen Z workers, the gap is even wider: 71% of men versus 59% of women (WEF, 2024). Analysts warn that this hesitancy could magnify gender imbalances in occupations susceptible to automation and limit women’s access to the tech-centric jobs of tomorrow.
Representation in the AI industry is similarly lopsided. Women account for just 29% of the global STEM workforce and are clustered in entry-level positions (Gender gaps in the labour markets of the future, 2024). When technology is built by homogenous teams, it can mirror their blind spots. Diverse lived experiences—such as those of women, people of colour, and non-binary individuals—are crucial for identifying biases and expanding AI’s possibilities. Without AI diversity and representation, systems shaping hiring, lending, and healthcare risk perpetuate inequality.
Bias in the Code: When AI Learns Our Prejudices
One of the most serious concerns is that AI systems can reinforce and amplify existing discrimination. UN Women notes that AI reflects the gender bias in society and can discriminate against women and girls in areas like hiring and healthcare when trained on biased data. From image-recognition models that misclassify women more often than men to résumé-screening algorithms that downgrade female-coded names, biased training data produces biased predictions (Contreras & Manuel, 2025).
The problem is not just technological—it is social. As UN Women’s experts stress, preventing gender bias in AI requires addressing the gender bias in our culture and ensuring that data reflects diverse experiences.
Towards AI Empowerment: What Needs to Change
The good news is that the AI gender gap is not inevitable. Policymakers, companies, and individuals can make choices to ensure AI empowerment for women. The World Economic Forum argues that businesses can bridge adoption gaps by upskilling at scale, engaging employees in co-creating AI strategies, and expanding IT teams to include women and non-binary individuals (WEF, 2024).
Closing this gap means offering flexible and varied training—remote, in-person, peer-to-peer—so that women juggling family responsibilities can participate. Inclusive design matters too: AI strategy should not reside solely in IT departments where women are scarce; rather, leaders across business units must be empowered to shape AI initiatives.
Researchers also call for AI ethics and governance frameworks that explicitly address gender. UN Women highlights the need for a global governance model to prevent AI systems from reinforcing harmful stereotypes and to ensure privacy and security (Molinier & Helene, 2024). It also calls for greater investment in girls’ and women’s STEM education so that women can lead AI development. Companies must audit algorithms for bias, involve social scientists and ethicists in development, and design with AI inclusivity in mind. This is not just compliance—it’s about building technology that reflects everyone.
AI Workplace Trends 2026: Where Women Can Lead
Emerging trends suggest that AI in the workplace will increasingly intersect with wellbeing, creativity, and community—areas where women are poised to lead. The Global Wellness Institute predicts a surge in AI-enhanced mental health tools, from empathetic chatbots to personalized stress-management programs. It also points to “inclusive wellness” micro-trends that prioritize trauma-informed practices, workplace wellbeing, and equitable access to digital health. For content creators and entrepreneurs, generative AI will enable new forms of storytelling, allowing women to craft narratives that challenge stereotypes and advocate for change (Global Wellness Institute, 2025).
Beyond AI-specific developments, broader social trends matter. Lifestyle sites forecast continued momentum in women’s leadership, flexible work arrangements, holistic health, and sustainable living (The Future is Female, 2025). Combining these macro trends with AI-driven tools suggests rich opportunities for women leading AI—whether launching wellness tech startups, building AI-powered media platforms, or advocating for ethical tech policies.
Conclusion: The Future is Female
The intersection of AI and women is a story of both promise and peril. AI can lighten workloads, personalise wellness, and open up new markets, yet without deliberate action, it could deepen inequalities. Women’s jobs are currently more exposed to automation, adoption rates lag behind men’s, and women remain underrepresented in AI development. Gender bias in AI systems springs from biased data and homogenous teams.
The solutions are clear: invest in training, broaden participation, design with ethics and inclusivity, and amplify diverse voices. As we head into 2025 and beyond, closing the AI gender gap is not just a moral imperative—it is a strategic necessity. By embracing AI feminism, championing AI diversity, and ensuring AI ethics, women can transform technology from a threat into a tool for empowerment.
