By Virginia Littlejohn UNDERSTANDING AI AI is not neutral — and women entrepreneurs need policies to change that The problem: A powerful tool built without us AI is the most powerful economic tool of our era. It is also, right now, a mirror of history — which has not always been kind to women. On May 25, 2026, Pope Leo XIV released his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas (“On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence”), calling for the “disarmament” of AI from “domination, exclusion, and destruction,” and urging that it “serve everyone and promote the common good.” Grounding part of his argument in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, he wrote: “There is still a long way to go to ensure that the rights of a great many, namely women, are equally and genuinely guaranteed throughout the world.” The data confirms his concern. The World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2025 projects that the gap between men and women is only 68.8% closed — and that it will take another 123 years to reach full parity across economics, education, health, and political representation. If AI is built and governed without women’s voices, that timeline gets longer, not shorter. What’s at stake if women stay silent about the risks Lean In’s research shows why women are cautious about AI: ■ Women are 38% more likely than men to have ethical reservations about AI ■ Women are 20% more likely to feel threatened by it ■ Women are 32% more likely to worry they’ll be perceived as cheating when they use it ■ Women are nearly twice as likely as men to predict more women than men will be laid off because of AI Harvard Business School research confirms women adopt AI at 25% lower rates than men — and that even when access is equal, women are still less likely to try new tools, largely because of fear of judgment and lack of encouragement. Men are 27% more likely to be praised for using AI at work, and 23% more likely to receive manager support to do so. Some caution is rational. But staying on the sidelines is not a safe option. AI trained on biased data doesn’t simply reflect past discrimination. It automates and accelerates it at scale. Consider these documented examples: ■ Amazon built an AI recruiting tool trained on past hires — who were overwhelmingly male. The algorithm taught itself to penalize resumes containing the word “women’s” — as in “women’s chess club captain” — and downgraded graduates of all-women’s colleges. ■ Goldman Sachs deployed the algorithm behind the Apple Card and offered women credit limits up to twenty times lower than their husbands, even when wives had identical or better credit scores — because the algorithm used proxy variables that correlated with gender without being explicitly programmed to do so. ■ ChatGPT generates recommendation letters for women using warmer, more social language — “supportive,” “collaborative,” “warm” — while letters for men use language of authority and expertise: “executed,” “led,” “expert.” These word choices industrialize biases that have suppressed women’s advancement for decades. ■ Medical AI systems for reading chest X-rays have been shown to underdiagnose pulmonary disease in women at significantly higher rates than in male patients — because the training data was built on a century of clinical trials that largely excluded women. Women currently make up just 22% of AI professionals and 28% of the global STEM workforce. Only 15% of investment committee members at the venture firms funding AI companies are women. Allfemale founding teams received just 1.1% of venture capital in 2025. The people building and funding AI are not representative of all of humanity — and the systems they build reflect the absence of women. Policies women must champion to fix this Good values are not enough. We need enforceable rules — but we shouldn’t stifle innovation. And we need women with deep AI expertise at every table where those rules are written. Fortunately, a highly credible global framework already exists. UNESCO’s Women 4 Ethical AI platform, launched in 2023 and grounded in a recommendation unanimously adopted by 194 UN member states, provides the clearest roadmap. It calls for: ■ Dedicated public budget allocations for gender-responsive AI programs 34 enterprising Women Yuriy Golub / Shutterstock.com
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